The Hot Bread Cafe: an activist bakery

The Hot Bread Cafe in New York is a nonprofit bakery that provides social and financial opportunities to immigrant women and their families while preserving cultural baking traditions.

Read more about their mission and products on their website.

In addition to other places, you can buy Hot Bread Cafe's products at Blue Apron Fine Foods in Park Slope, Brooklyn-- a wonderful specialty foods shop I visited and fell in love with during my trip to New York last spring.

You can donate to Hot Bread Kitchen and support ESL classes for some of their bakers, or donate in support of a delivery vehicle-- these are the two fundraising priorities currently listed on the website.

Nonprofits and bakeries are two things that I hold dear and near to my heart, so the combination of the two is a union I love to hear about.

Sanctity of scones

The Seattlest makes a good point about the sanctity of scones, asserting that people who think they do not like scones actually do, indeed like them.

The blog explains that paperweight-like products in coffee shops often masquerade as scones, but are nothing like what scones are meant to taste like in their true form.

I couldn't agree more-- the scones featured at some large chain coffee shops and cafes are sometimes downright insulting.

Although one of the Seattlest local readers commented that we should not forget The Hi-Spot Cafe, a cafe in the Medrona neighborhood of Seattle whose menu boasts a 'Scone of the Day'.

Any other scone suggestions out there?