Seriously my friends, is there anything better than chocolate and toffee together? Especially when the toffee has a brown sugar-flavored buttery snap and luscious chocolate is smeared over the top so it hardens and melds with the crackly caramelized matzoh underneath. When a marriage is this good, a picture can only do partial justice to the love that exists between the happy couple. The Caramelized Matzoh…
For the holidays this year, I decided to take up a friend’s offer to visit their family in Méribel, a village way high up in the French alps. As you can see, it’s a spectacular place. And I’m not just talking ‘gorgeous sunsets’ or ‘charmingly quaint’ spectacular. I mean, Méribel was mind-blowingly, insanely hallucinante. Seriously, I wasn’t prepared for the awesome beauty of it all….
This dessert is the result of a happy accident. I’d been developing some recipes and after a couple of furious days of recipe testing, I had a zillion containers of various odds and ends lying around. I mixed and matched things together, blended them all up, and stuck the mixture in the freezer. A bit later, I tentatively dug in my spoon in and tasted…
Maybe more than Americans, French people do like marshmallows. A lot. You see them in bakeries and pastry shops, often in long strands, on display either in lengths, or tied into knots, often stored in apothecary jars. It’s a tradition that goes back, before the advent of gelatin, when marshmallows were made with mallow extract which was (and still may be) considered good for your…
My chocolate has gray streaks. It is okay to use? That’s called bloom and it happens when the chocolate melts or gets warm, and then cools again without being tempered. When you buy chocolate, it is already tempered. However if it’s exposed to heat or melted, it can fall out of temper and lose its suspension. (You can read my instructions for how to temper…
If G. Detou didn’t exist, I couldn’t live in Paris. Seriously. The overstocked, but impeccably neat shelves at G. Detou do indeed have everything, as the name implies in French (J. Detou is a play-on-words, meaning “I have everything”.) But when you’re someone like me that does an inordinate amount of baking, plus loves…and I mean loves…to discover new and unusual foods and chocolates, a…
The French like chocolate as much, or even more, than the rest of us. That includes Clotilde Dusoulier, who writes the blog Chocolate & Zucchini. If you’re a reader, you’re privy to her charming stories about her life in Paris accompanied recipes. And you’ve also likely heard of her book: Chocolate & Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen. Turning the pages and reading about her life…
As a cookbook author, whenever you do a cooking demonstration, there’s always The Question. It’s the one that’s the most frequently asked when you’re teaching classes. For me it’s “Can that be frozen?” Since my freezer is usually so crammed with stuff I can’t imagine wedging in a multi-layer cake amongst all the rock-hard frozen madness that I call “my freezer”…except for now, because I came home from…
How about a pain aux céréales? Here’s my list of Ten Great Things To Eat in Paris – things that I think you shouldn’t miss!
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