Zoë François is the author of Zoë Bakes Cakes and even though her name is French, she’s an American cake baker. Known for a series of books on making Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, as well as books that continue that theme for making pizza, flatbread, holidays breads, and gluten-free breads, Zoë has finally turned her talents as a pastry chef to cakes. After growing up in a commune where the closest she got to sugar was a raisin, Zoë discovered Twinkies, which awakened her to the wonderful world of sweets and started selling homemade cookies from a cart in college, which eventually led to a job decorating cakes at Ben & Jerry’s, since she admitted to me on an Instagram Live video I did with her, that she didn’t excel at scooping ice cream.
I had a similar job scooping ice cream at a very busy shop while in college. Challenges included a persistent stressed muscle near my upper arm, which didn’t get better the more ice cream I scooped. There were customers who’d order one scoop, but ask me to make it “one really big scoop” because they didn’t want to pay the extra 50¢ for two scoops. And people paying for a $1.30 cone of ice cream with a hundred and thirty pennies, maybe with a few very thin dimes tossed in, which they’d line up on the stainless steel counter between us, which were nearly impossible to pick up with wet, sticky hands.
(You tell me if I was a brat by holding their ice cream cone in the other hand, while they cooled their heels waiting for me to pick up each individual coin, one-by-one, with the other – finally handing their cone over only after the last coin was pried off the counter and put in the register, which the owner monitored like a hawk. Another employee, if people were rude to her, would carefully balance – but not pack – the ice cream scoop delicately on top of the cone, so when they went outside to lick it, it would topple off. The moral of the story, as I often advise, is to be nice to people serving you food.)
A few years ago, tahini took its place in the spotlight. People discovered the sesame paste, usually used in hummus, could be used in cookies, cakes, salad dressings, sauces as well as in other places. Soon halvah also had its day, becoming a star ingredient in tart doughs and rugelach. But halvah is a wonderful treat on its own. During my childhood, I’d only been…
There’s a lot of “stuffed” stuff that goes viral online and it wasn’t my intention to do a caramel-stuffed chocolate chip cookie. Yet there I was, faced with a few batches of caramels leftover from recipe testing that didn’t quite make the cut, and wanted to put the caramels to good use. So why not?
Of all the books I own on French cuisine, Let’s Eat France is one of my favorites. First up, the book is huge. I don’t mean in terms of scope, which it is. But physically the book is enormous. Think the size of the tablet listing five of the ten commandments, and just as heavy. The book is 13+ inches (33cm) tall and clocks in…
A few desserts on this blog stick with me, often because I posted them a while back, but discovering that I’d like to tweak them a little to reflect my current tastes. As anyone who cooks or bakes knows, things change over time. New ingredients get introduced (such as bean-to-bar chocolates) and we learn better or faster ways to do things the more we make…
Who knew that one of my most FAQs would be “Where can I find fresh tortillas in Paris?” Yes, there’s no shortage of bread in Paris, with over 1200 bakeries in the city baking it fresh daily, but with a burgeoning interest in Mexican food, and a number of residents from the Americans (and elsewhere) who enjoy and crave tortillas, there are several places where…
It’s funny some of the dos and don’ts that people have come up with around food. Things like that you shouldn’t wash button mushrooms, that you should drink red wine with cheese, and that you shouldn’t let soap anywhere near your cast iron skillet. Nope, nope, and nope. Not sure where these things get started, but people grab the ball and run with it without…
I’m often asked what my favorite cookbooks are and invariably I pull out a copy of The Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rodgers. It’s one of those rare books where you learn something from every sentence on every page, and in every recipe that you make from it. Judy was an amazing cook and whatever she made was unusually good, in spite of its (seemingly)…
This year was a good year for baking books. I didn’t get to see them all, or bake from them, but one that I got a preview of before it was released was Dessert Person by Claire Saffitz. She may be familiar to you because of her tenure in the test kitchen at Bon Appétit and more recently, her very popular online videos, but reading…
