Kenzie Blogs Life: Minnesota

Black Coffee: Waffle Bar

9:00:00 AM

I love food. And you probably know, especially if you follow me on twitter, that I love breakfast. Honestly could eat breakfast all day long. I love going to bed just a bit hungry only to wake up even hungrier for breakfast. I can't really say that I have a favorite place for breakfast or even a favorite breakfast food. It is all just so great.
With my birthday being the long weekend, I had the chance to go to a new restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, near the University there, called Black Coffee and Waffle Bar. The moment I stepped inside, it smelled incredible.

The morning was rainy, but I was too excited for this waffle place to even care a little bit.

We glanced over the menu, though I had already picked out what I was getting weeks ago....I told you I was very excited right?

I ordered an iced chai, which was incredible and the spices in it were amazing.

It was like a refreshing sip of Christmas (which is the next thing I'm looking forward to).

This chai also did not make my stomach sour, which was even more reason to enjoy it.

They also have lattes, this is my Uncles' and I couldn't resist taking a photo of the art.

After waiting 30 minutes for our waffles, and finding a spot to eat, our group of 8, finally tucked into our waffles. In the time that we were waiting, my mom so kindly took photos of me in front of the big black brick siding they have. This was actually fun because every time we walked back inside, to get out of the rain, the amazing scent of fresh waffles and coffee instantly wrapped us in a nice warm, dry blanket.

Top: Forever 21 ; Skirt: Forever 21 : Tights: Target

Shoes: Target

You probably saw the top one on my instagram.

While everyone was tucking right into their waffles, I did manage to get a few snaps of them before they were in our bellies!

(This was mine.)

I chose the Naughty Waffle, it had strawberries, blueberries, bananas, granola, almond butter, and whipped cream on top!)

This one is my Uncles', he chose the One Bad Pig Waffle, it had ham and swiss on top of it.

(I couldn't stop taking pictures of my waffle, it just looked incredible!)

While the waffles had to be waited for, my drink came out right away and that was very nice! I was extremely happy with how everything tasted, and if you are ever in the Minneapolis area, you need to check this place out! (This isn't a sponsored post but it should be.)

They have different varieties of waffles and you can even make your own!

(Check out the website here!)

I hope you all enjoyed your weekend! I had a great one and I can't wait to show you more from it!

Thanks for reading! Make sure to follow me on bloglovin, google +, instagram and twitter!

Leave a comment and tell me your favorite breakfast food!!

Can't wait to read them all!

Kenzie

Bacon

Birthday Treats

10:30:00 AM

If you aren't following me on Instagram or Twitter, you may not have noticed that the sixth of September was my birthday! Being Labor Day weekend, meant having my birthday on a four day weekend. There are 3 birthdays right in a row in August, and it was also a good reason to celebrate them as well.
My Grandparents picked me up from University on Friday and we drove over to Minneapolis for the festivities. Friday night was more of a laid back, wait for everyone else to arrive, night. You may remember my post last summer about the Great Minnesota Get Together, also known as the Minnesota State Fair, which we all attended this year as well! Here are some of the delicious foods that we tried this year!

This wasn't the first one we tried, it was actually the Gizmo, like last year and you can read about that and the other foods on the post I just linked!

The photo above is actually Chicken Fried Bacon. It was quite tasty, though more chicken flavor than bacon and with maple dipping sauce (which I personally didn't care for as much.) But wow.

Here they're making taffy. Like sea salt taffy...I was kind of in awe watching the machine flip the stuff around.

The fair this year had listed many of its new food items and those were mostly on our "must try" list! This one was Salted Caramel Puff Ice Cream. It was pretty delicious, definitely something anyone could make at home I suppose. Just have vanilla ice cream, caramel sauce, and puff corn!

Being Labor Day weekend, many people have off and therefore...this crowd all had the same idea of going to the fair!

The baby animal barn is always my favorite part, this little lamb on the left was sleeping in its caretakers lap, with its head in her hand. TOO cute! We also wandered through the horse barns and saw these guys there as well as horses with sparkles on their rear ends.

The next foods we tried out were a macaroni cup cake, which my sister took an immediate liking to. Not being a fan of macaroni, I wasn't too thrilled, but I did enjoy the deep fried oreos!

The Italian Desert Nachos were probably my favorite things I got. Though a bit pricey, customers could get any variety they wanted! I chose white chocolate, almonds, strawberries and whipped cream for mine and it was incredible. It was very filling and I was glad it was the last thing I ate!

I also had cinnamon flavored almonds as a snack. And of course I got shaved ice and chose Watermelon as this years flavor.

It was a great start to my birthday weekend!!

Arizona

Trip Southwest (Part One)

2:00:00 PM

If you haven't seen my few instagram posts about where I've been recently then you wouldn't know that I've been in Arizona for the past week or so, enjoying time with my family whilst we visited my grandparents. I think I'll put in a few bits and pieces about the trip amongst regular blog posts. We'll see!
Anyway, the best part of going on vacation is that you're usually going somewhere warm. An even better perk for this trip was that there happened to be a big snow storm coming as we left and that made getting into the sun and further away from the snow, that much more exciting. Of course flying from Minneapolis, we had to take a quick stop at the Mall of America. Shopping the day after Christmas? Not the best idea. It was packed and if you're someone who has anxiety in large crowds, then you probably should not go. Though the Christmas time decorations are beautiful!

With a snowstorm brewing, they had to de-ice our airplane, which meant they brought out weird looking machines and we sat in the airplane on the runway for about an hour. But we finally took off and I was thrilled.

The whole getting to Arizona part was fine (aside from the jabbering TSA agents who managed to make the security point take twice as long as it needed to be) I remember looking down over the land we were flying over and it was just beautiful and I wished I knew right where we were so that I could see it up close. Once we landed and realized it wasn't as warm as we had expected it to be, but that feeling was quickly squandered by the fact that it was still way warmer than where we had just left.

The sun was out. And that's all that mattered.

There were cactus-(es?) and palm trees. And sunshine!

And I can't wait to share what we did whilst we were there! So make sure you stay tuned for those blog posts coming up!

I hope you all had a lovely holiday! If you're not back to school yet, I hope you're still enjoying the lovely holiday!

Kenzie

Animals

The Great Minnesota Get Together!

12:00:00 PM

It’s inevitable, the Summer of 2014 is coming to a close. For some of you it may have already come to an end, which leaves you in school waiting until next year!

With a little more than a week left of my Summer holiday, my family and I headed off to Minnesota (yes again, we go there a lot). My sister was bringing her friends along, as a celebration for her birthday and staying in the hotel connected to the Mall Of America. Whilst the three of them were shopping, my aunt, uncle, mom, step-dad, cousin and I headed out to the Minnesota State Fair! The fair has been around since 1859 though in 1885 the fair had officially obtained a permanent ground for it to be held on. Since then, it’s grown. A lot.

I hadn't really spent a full day at the fair since about 2010, so it had been awhile. The day started off with a bit of rain, but I was too excited to be going again that I really wasn’t going to let that worry me. The weather did stay overcast though, which in the end might have been better as it was still humid and would have been ten times hotter had the sun actually been shining. The very first thing we did was create a game plan, what we wanted to see, eat and where to go, then we put it to action.

Our first stop was at a food booth selling Gizmo’s. It looked like a hot dog, but covered in cheese and lots of it. A Gizmo is really ground beef and Italian sausage with a special sauce and seasonings, covered with melted mozzarella cheese and served on a toasted Italian roll! Sounds healthy doesn't it? Don’t worry, I purposely ate healthily all week knowing that this was going to be a really bad day for eating!

We then moved on to look through the Campers, if you don’t know what a camper is it’s basically a trailer that people hook up to their cars (mostly trucks) and pull behind. Inside the camper, is usually a small bunk bed, a queen or king sized bed, a kitchen and sitting area as well. It’s like a tour bus but smaller.

After moving on from the campers, we stopped to try other foods as well. It had only been twenty minutes. Don’t worry, everyone was sharing and not buying a full size for themselves! There was jerky, and samples of popcorn as well as Pronto Pups!

(Kettle Corn) (Turkey Jerky)

Coca-Cola even had a “personalize your coke” booth, which of course I had to try!

We did finally make it to the Brownie stand, where they bake fresh brownies right there and serve cold milk to go along with it. They’re so good! There were also amazing fresh chocolate chip cookies at a booth called Sweet Martha's! Every time I go to the fair, it's a definite must stop!

At the fair, there are loads of activities and buildings to take a walk through. You can take a peak at new inventions, see things for your home, watch demonstrations, try out some games and go on some rides! There’s also an international bazaar, which was really fun to see. There was a man playing an neat looking instrument, booths ranging from Africa, Thailand and Ireland!

Rides! Inventions

Home Goods

"How to put out a fire" demo

Taken at the Baazar

Haunted Mansion

We stopped in the dairy barn just in time to see the Princess of the Milky Way getting her head carved from actual Butter! It looked really cold inside the glass case she was sitting in, as she was wearing a winter jacket and gloves!

Sticking to the cold theme, we took a short walk through some Christmas lights, which were really fun and made me wish winter wasn't actually cold in Wisconsin.

We did stop, at one of my favorite places, the animal barns! In it’s own unique way the Minnesota State fair holds a barn full of baby animals and their mothers. The fair offers its visitors a first hand experience at viewing the actual live birth of pigs, cows and sheep! They also have an incubator where eggs from different types of poultry are warmed and watched to hatch. The little animals are so adorable! I really wanted to take one home! We were just in time to see the newborn pigs! After seeing that, I spotted my favorite treat to cool down with!

Shaved ice! They had a variety of flavors and I could mix and match them so I went with strawberry and peach! It was delicious and really helped cool me down since it was so humid outside!

I'm wearing Turquoise and Caicos on my nails by Essie!

As we made our way through the fair, there were tons of other food booths as well. Flowering Onions, French Fries, Lemonade, Tacos, Poutine (remember when I wrote about Irish Fries?). There was gummy bears on a stick, olives on a stick, pickles on a stick, you name it it was probably on a stick!

Flowering Onions, Lemonade stand

Tacos

Poutine

Strawberries & Creme Deep Fried Olives on a stick

Sweet Martha's Cookies!

Cheese Curds (Clearly not as good as Wisconsin as we're the dairy state)

We also went into the cow, sheep and pig barn next! There were more piglets which I did get the chance to pet! It was so cute!

We then moved on to the horse barn. Even though I had been to the Minnesota State fair before, I don’t ever remember being in the horse barn. They had some really unique ones standing there, and they were so cute! I love horses and part of me wanted to get on one and ride off!

We moved away from the animals, onto tasting more food and taking a ride on the giant colorful slide! The view from the slide was pretty neat as well!

We did wander into a part of the fair that happened to be next to the grandstand where we could hear Toby Keith doing his sound check! It was so cool! They have a lot of great acts and big names that come to the fair. Last time I was here I was able to see Tim Mcgraw and Julianne Hough!

The Grandstand

In one of the buildings they had a man blowing bubbles from Liquid Nitrogen! I thought that was really cool, it didn't feel very cold though, but when I blew the bubble away it disappeared into a cloud of white mist.

The woman behind me is clearly shocked by the whole thing.

(I'm wearing this flowy tank top by Atlast)

At the end of the fair, like usual, we let our tired and sore legs and feet rest by using the sky ride. We had a neat view from up high, and the breeze was perfect to cool down with.