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 through the book, I learned that she just happened to have gone to Harvard, was a graduate student in French food history in Montreal, studied pastry at Ecole Ferrandi in Paris, and worked at the now-closed Spring restaurant, which jolted me back that era in Paris when a younger generation of chefs was opening restaurants and changing the game in France (sometimes, controversially), focusing on fresh ingredients and putting their own mark on French cuisine.
That’s how I feel about her book. Claire pretty much changes the pastry game. Preserved lemons are added to a glorious-looking Lemon Meringue Cake, chocolate and hazelnuts enrich a Galette des Rois, and coffee finds its way into a Coffee-flavored Coffee Cake. (How come no one’s thought of that before?) But these Oatmeal and Pecan Praline Brittle Cookies sounded so good to me that I decided to start off with them.
Hello – Emily here! Whether single or in a relationship, I’ve always loved Valentine’s Day. My favorite color is pink, it reminds me my birthday is around the corner and if nothing else, chocolates and champagne will soon be on sale. I was single on Valentine’s Day every year until I turned 29, however I never felt alone and I never failed to celebrate in my…
This quirky cocktail brings together three disparate ingredients; tequila, Chartreuse, and Amer Picon, to create the Jaguar, a drink that hews on the bitter side, with a bit of intrigue from the tequila, and the herbal punch of Chartreuse. I couldn’t find much intel on the origin of this cocktail*, and how these three ingredients found their way into the same glass. Some information on…
Two of my favorite flavors come together right here, in this Coffee Caramel Panna Cotta, which offers up the rich flavor of caramel with a few strong shots of espresso. I seem to have good caramel karma and when I baked professionally, the executive pastry chef at one restaurant told me that I was the one she wanted to make the caramel desserts since I…
One of the things I keep vowing to do is to read more books. It’s hard when I’m at home, where there are many other things beckoning for my attention. But when I go on vacation, I bring a few books along and find a good chair to park myself in as much as possible. It helps that internet is either non-existent, or the connection…
I’ll admit to being the kind of guy that likes a pink drink every now and then, but I don’t like to admit that I’m the kind of guy that buys raspberries in the winter. Writing cookbooks with deadlines that don’t always flow with the seasons, if I need a few cherries in the winter to test a recipe or a few cups of blueberries,…
One of the lesser-known French pastries is Bostock. Perhaps it’s the funny name that doesn’t sound very French, as pain au chocolat or chausson aux pommes do, that’s been keeping it out of the spotlight. True, the name does sound like a Swiss bouillon mix and although I’ve read it’s from Normandy, I haven’t found any conclusive evidence of that. But wherever it’s from, the…
Welcome to 2021. We had sort of, um…an abrupt beginning to the New Year. After a punishing 2020 where the pandemic pretty much upended everything in our lives, a lot of us were looking forward to some stability, seasoned with some optimism about the virus, but things took a decidedly different turn in a direction not many of us could imagine. I stepped away from…
I’m taking a little pause after an especially hectic December and the holidays…and 2020 in general. One task I took on before the end of the year was moving my newsletter to Substack. If you’d like to subscribe to my new newsletter, you can do so using the signup form above or here. Once you sign up, you’ll get an email asking you to…









