People are often fascinated by what, and how I eat. They think that if you’re a baker, you spend all your time eating pastries. Which is like thinking that bartenders spend all their time drinking. My not-so-secret strategy is that whenever I eat something, I want it to be the best of its genre. I don’t want or need a ton of cream or whatever;…
I haven’t visited Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams in Ohio, but I’ve heard Jeni Bauer’s ice cream was sensational. Because I can’t get everywhere – no matter how hard I try – her ice cream came to me in the form of her book, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home. When Jeni’s book was released, we had a nice interchange via e-mail about ice cream making,…
If you skip over the fact that I made three trips in the past thirty days, and have two more coming up in the next two weeks, I don’t really travel all that much. (And it’s funny because some people like to try to point out inconsistencies about things I write about, which is amusing because I take even greater pains to point them out…
One of the nifty things about a blog is that you can easily revisit recipes and make revisions, while learning more about baking, and sharing those discoveries, as you go. When I wrote Ready for Dessert, I was able to update my favorite recipes, many created over a decade ago, and I had fun including the changes I’d made over the years.
Hard as it is to believe, I have a few extra chocolates lying around. Because it’s almost summer and I’m getting ready for my very own mash-up – An American Under a Hot Zinc Roof in Paris – I need to start using up all of my chocolate, pronto, before the annual summer meltdown commences. Sometime a while back, I recall reading about a Frrrozen…
I’ve been quoted on more than one occasion as saying something along the lines of “To a pastry chef, a good marshmallow is the equivalent of a pricey and rare black truffle to a regular chef.” And thinking about it as I type right now, every cookbook I’ve ever written has some sort of recipe for a marshmallow or marshmallow-topped dessert in it. When I…
Michael Recchiuti was recently here in Paris for a few weeks, visiting, and eating his way around town. Because he’s a chocolatier (from San Francisco), of course, he concentrated on chocolate. Interestingly I couldn’t remember how we met, but he recalled the event pretty well. Apparently a group of us had been invited to Robert Steinberg’s kitchen, since he was working on developing ScharffenBerger chocolate….
Les françaises are justifiably proud of their chocolates and chocolatiers, but if you talk to them about Swiss chocolate, many will say – “Oh, Swiss chocolate is very, very good.” Yet when I press them on which particular brands of chocolate are “very good”, they often don’t, or can’t, pin down the specific names* of any. Folks who have been to Lausanne – French, American,…
I cannot not tell you about Aux Merveilleux de Fred. I bought three small meringues to share with friends, and when sitting on a nearby park bench waiting for one of them to arrive, I dug into the first meringue. I don’t swear on this blog so I won’t share exactly what I said, but take it from me, a few expletives were uttered.
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