Breakfast with Amber

April 2020: At Least We Have Scones

The story so far: we have been trapped in our house for a two-week quarantine which became a four-week quarantine which became a six-week quarantine, so on and so forth. The only times we had been outside the house were for walks around the neighborhood in our fabric masks. The masks we had on hand were too small to fit around my ear, so I'd always wear these wrap-around things that were supposed to cover your neck as well as your nose and mouth. Still new to this fabric on my face, I thought I was going to suffocate, but I was able to acclimate to the lack of oxygen.

Of course, I was missing campus because a lot of things were put on hold because of this quarantine. Like I mentioned before, that street dust project in Earth's Environmental System had to be completed virtually, making it harder to coordinate with our partners, but at least we had already collected all our samples. When I turned in that project, I probably heaved the heaviest sigh of relief since I started college. I was also going to be in Momentum, the school's annual dance show, but that was out the window, too. (I was also kind of glad that was out the window because I was in the Irish dance number.) The housing process for sophomore year was also underway, and I wouldn't be able to meet my new roommate until the fall, if at all. Her name was Vasti, and we were going to stay in Murchison together.

I wasn't a big fan of having to go out and find my own roommate. Being the recluse that I am, I preferred if res life found a roommate for me and hoped that they wouldn't flub it like they did with Trinity. Instead, I had to go into their housing portal and scroll through pages and pages of student profiles to find people with similar interests to me and then sending copy-pasted e-mail after copy-pasted e-mail to each one only to get responses such as "I've already found a roommate" or "I'm sticking with my roommate for last year," and sometimes, they didn't respond at all. It wasn't until Vasti sent a request to me that I finally had someone. Then Trinity announced that only some students would be returning to campus in the fall, and I wasn't one of them, so our plans fell through. To this day, I have not met Vasti in person.

But the important part was that I was missing campus, and when my mom said she had found a recipe for cinnamon scones that we could make, I was all in.

I briefly mentioned the cinnamon scones at Mabee Dining Hall in August, and I am going to bring them up again. The scones that they served were the best scones I had ever had. Before this point, I had never actually had scones, but I saw them at the dessert station and decided to take a couple to munch on on the way to class. They were pastries that came in blueberry, chocolate chip, and cinnamon, so why not? They were also mini scones, so they were easy to carry. The density was more in line with a soft cookie that practically melted in your mouth when you chewed it, and each bite was bursting with flavor. At the start of the year, I'd take chocolate chip scones some days and cinnamon scones on others. I didn't really care for blueberries at the time because sometimes they get stuck in your teeth, and sometimes, they're still moist, so they wind up squirting juice when you bite down on them.

As time progressed, though, I started picking the cinnamon scones more often. Cinnamon is like my crack. If you give me cinnamon flavored anything, I'm going to eat it. Snickerdoodles? I'm there. Also, spice cookies. I don't know if they contain cinnamon, but they definitely set off the same happy brain chemicals. The coffee cake that my mom likes to bake for me? Not actually coffee. It's a white cake with a cinnamon crumble on the top. (Supposedly, it goes well with coffee, thus the name.) I grew up eating cinnamon sugar mini donuts. I sprinkle cinnamon sugar in my oatmeal when it doesn't have enough flavor on its own. As much as I like chocolate, if there is cinnamon available, I will pick that instead, as is evident with these scones.

Fast-forward to April. We're stuck in quarantine with no way to access those yummy nummy Aramark scones, so when Mom asked if she wanted to bake these scones together, I definitely said yes. I must have told her that I liked the scones from Mabee Dining Hall. Otherwise, she would have never brought it up with me.