Whenever an American friend in Paris has a birthday, I invariably offer to make the cake for the big fête. Not that there’s a lack of great bakeries in Paris, but Americans always seem to crave the same thing: a big, tall, all-American chocolate cake with an overabundance of swirls and swoops of chocolate frosting. And who am I to deny them? And what better to…
People have been making ice cream far longer than the invention of electricity so there’s no reason you can’t make ice cream and sorbets at home without a machine! The advantage to using an electric or hand-cranked machine is that the final result will be smoother and creamier. Freezing anything from liquid-to-solid means you’re creating hard ice crystals, so if you’re making it by hand,…
In my never-ending quest to improve my French, I had some friends over for dinner last night and was asking them what the word ‘grue‘ meant. After consulting le dictionnaire français (aka: mon ma bible), the only definition we came across was that a grue was a ‘crane’—as in the long-limbed bird. Curiously, it’s sometimes used a slang for a ‘working woman’, if you know…
There’s a new face in the Marais: Gérard Mulot. Sure there’s lot of shoe shops, sunglass boutiques, and questionable “art” galleries in the Marais. But there’s a dearth of bakeries and pastry shops. So imagine my surprise and delight when one not-particularly-good bakery near me closed (the surprise part), then re-opened the other day as…Gérard Mulot! (the delight) For those of you who don’t know…
People often say I’m the luckiest person in the world for the kind of life they perceive that I lead. But I’ve found some folks who’ve got me beat, hands-down. I’m back from my book tour, which was exhilarating but made me a tad homesick. Although really, if one thinks about it, how many times can one visit Target in a month? And don’t even…
Merci beaucoup to the swarm of folks that showed up for my booksigning and ice cream tasting at Fog City News yesterday. I hadn’t been in the store in some time and was not only thrilled to see the most unusual and creative selection of chocolate tablets that’s ever been collected in one place, but it was great to meet those of you who stopped…
I am such an idiot. I won’t tell you who, but years back, someone with a thriving restaurant on 18th Street in San Francisco alerted me to a great business opportunity nearby. Food-related, of course. I passed, and now the area is the culinary destination in the Bay Area. (Aside from the taqueria on Church Street across from the Afeway…) Although I missed the proverbial…
In my continuing adventures to bring you some of the more interesting chocolates from around the globe, and get through as much of my chocolate before the meltdown of summer heat attacks my chocolate stash, you might remember a few months back I wrote about a conversation I had when I shocked some unworldly women (who…me?) that asked me which country makes the best chocolate….
Served with a cool, tangy scoop of Vanilla Frozen Yogurt, from The Perfect Scoop This is one of my favorite types of ways to serve chocolate in a cake: strong, bittersweet, and creamy-smooth with a soft, luscious melt-in-your-mouth texture that’s so tender it practically evaporates seconds after you take a bite. But the intense chocolate flavors lingers on and on and on. Bliss.
A
Get David's newsletter sent right to your Inbox!
Sign up for my newsletter and get my FREE guidebook to the best bakeries and pastry shops in Paris...
