BFFs in Boston

Hello there! I have lots and lots of pictures to share today...

This is one of my favorite Christmas ornaments. Our serving dishes are the Arthur Court Magnolia pattern and this is an ornament from that collection:
Here's one of our Alma Mater ornaments.
This is for southern girls like me who didn't know snowflakes actually looked like snowflakes! I had never seen flakes this big before.
Another Alma Mater ornament. This one with our lovely mascot Rocky on it.
A close-up of the wise men and camel in our nativity set.
And here's the shepherd and donkey.
OK. Now, how to make bagels. I use the dough hook on my KitchenAid. You can definitely make them without a large mixer, but I never knead by hand anymore. It's so much easier and less messy with a Kitchen Aid!
Combine 1 1/2 cups warm water, 3 Tbsp. sugar and 2 Tbsp. yeast in the bowl. Let is sit and froth for a while. Then add 4 1/4 cups bread flour and 1 Tbsp. salt. It'll look something like this once it is all combined:

Cover the bowl with a towel and place it in a warm, draft-free place. It will double in about an hour and look something like this:
Make little balls of dough and let rest for 10 minutes while you boil 2 quarts of water and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Then, you form the dough balls into bagel shapes. I like to make a hole in the balls with my thumbs and work out from there. Nathan likes to roll the dough into a snake and join the ends.

Drop the bagels in the boiling water and boil 45 seconds on each side.
After the boiling, put the bagels on a wire rack to drain (I put my rack on top of a cutting board).
Brush the bagels with an egg white and add your toppings (salt, cheese, sesame seeds, etc).
Nathan wanted parmesan bagels for his birthday. Yum.
Bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes. As you can see, this recipe yielded 9 bagels that we in-between a regular bagel size and a mini-bagel size. You could probably make a dozen mini-bagels (1 bread serving each) or 6 regular size bagels (2 servings each).
And now for the snow! It snowed and snowed and snowed this weekend. Saturday was bitterly cold, but yesterday was around 32 degrees so we ventured out. Here's the view out of one of the windows yesterday at church.
And here is our church surrounded by lots of snow. It didn't stop snowing from Friday afternoon until Saturday night and then it picked back up again yesterday morning and snowed all afternoon!
Here are some pink snow people on Boston Common. It was so beautiful on the Common. I loved it.
Here is Boston's ginormous Christmas tree all covered in snow.
And here are Nathan and I on the Common. Isn't my hat crazy? I bought it a few years ago on the streets of New York. Right after this picture, we went inside Starbucks to warm up a bit and then walked around downtown for about another hour. It was so beautiful to see everything covered in snow!
Oh, and here are pigeon tracks in the snow. I hate pigeons more than anyone else I know, but these tracks were adorable.
Our family birthday plans were canceled yesterday because the snow turned to sleet and the roads were not too clear, but we'll celebrate tonight at UBurger. Then, only one more work day until my fabulous Christmas break. I won't be back in the office until January 5th!