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A l’Etoile d’Or is Open Again!

[UPDATE: As of September 2022, after 46 years, Madame Acabo has retired and closed her shop in Paris.] When a gas explosion that happened in the basement destroyed her shop, many couldn’t believe that one of their favorite chocolate shops in Paris was gone, including Denise Acabo herself. I visited her shortly afterward and she was in shock, missing her store – but most of all, missing…

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Liddabit Sweets

I was trying to explain to my French other-half what an incubator was. In America, we don’t use the term just for babies, but we use it to describe groups that exist in places like San Francisco, where new ideas are born from creative minds which are often the result of thinking “outside the box.” There are the tech giants, like Apple, Facebook, and Google, that started that…

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Salty, Deep-Dark Chocolate Brownies

When I was in Brooklyn a few months back doing a booksigning with the lovely folks from The Brooklyn Kitchen, a friendly woman came up to me bearing a box of treats from her bakery. I don’t like to eat in front of people, because, frankly, no one wants to meet up with an author while he is shoving pastries in his mouth. And in…

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Helene’s Brownies

The French do a lot of baked goods very well. if you’ve been to Paris, you don’t need me to tell you that with over 1300 bakeries in Paris, it’s not hard to find a pastry or baked good on every block that will be more satisfying than you can imagine. One of the rare baked goods that the French haven’t quite mastered are les…

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Introducing the All-New Paris Pastry App

UPDATE: I created the Paris Pastry app to feature and highlight hundreds of the best chocolate shops, bakeries, and pastry shops in Paris.  Unfortunately, the technology of building and maintaining the app eventually exceeded my capabilities and it wasn’t possible for me to update it as often as wanted to. Because of those limitations, and others, I made the difficult decision to remove the app for sale. If…

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Chocolate, Peanut Butter and Pretzel Cupcakes

Well, this is quite a baking book. Starting off with the first thirty-one pages, which contain some of the most profanity laced – and best – advice I’ve read about baking. (Hmm, maybe I’ve been doing it all wrong.) But I couldn’t put Robicelli’s: A Love Story with Cupcakes down as I read through the fore matter, which the authors admonish that you’d better read…

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Pierre Herme Macarons

One of the things about living in a city like Paris is that you spend a lot of time – well, dealing with life. Bills to pay, paperwork to do, typos to avoid, stolen bikes to replace, smokers to dodge on sidewalks waving lit cigarettes (I got nailed the other day – ouch!), or buying a pair of shoes, can easily take up much –…

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Eclairs in Paris

I’m often asked about upcoming trends and each time it happens, I am sorely tempted to respond, “If I could see the future, I’d be buying lottery tickets.” I guess it makes good press – but the unfortunate thing about most trends is that they are often temporary. (In many cases, it’s a relief to see them go when their time is up.) Yet other…

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Dave and Kate’s Chocolate Brownies

One thing you may not know about me – after blogging for twenty years, you thought you knew everything about me, didn’t you? – was that the Hepburns were my neighbors growing up. They were extremely nice people, always smiling and very pleasant. While Katherine wasn’t in the ‘hood, it was her brother and his wife who lived just down the street. If you grew…

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