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!
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,…
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