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ready for dessert: behind-the-scenes, baking tips, and errata

Thereโ€™s a lot going on when you write a cookbook. You begin with an idea, then spend a year or two testing and developing recipes. Once the first draft is done, it goes through a developmental edit where the editor gives feedback on what youโ€™ve done so far and offers up changes, ideas, or things to reconsider. After youโ€™ve implemented those (or not), it thenโ€ฆ

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Get my new book ready for dessertโ€ฆnow available!

Itโ€™s almost ready! Coming this Fall is the new, completely revised edition of Ready for Dessert: My Best Recipes. [Itโ€™s now available at ==> Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and at the links below.] When my publisher told me they wanted a new edition of the book, I decided to revise the book completely, from top to bottom. Ready for Dessert is a compilation ofโ€ฆ

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Flan Parisien

When people inquire about recipes from the pastries on offer in Paris pastry shops, I look at the recipes we used when I went to pastry school at Ecole Lรชnotre and itโ€™s hard to imagine cutting down a recipe that makes a hundred canelรฉs into a recipe that makes six or eight for a home cook, who likely doesnโ€™t want to go out and buyโ€ฆ

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Caramel Almond Pie

After my summer break, I came back to the blog and found out that it still thought it was on vacationโ€ฆand wasnโ€™t accepting any photos at this time. I was proud of myself for finally tackling a recipe that Iโ€™ve had on my radar for a while and spent a day baking it, taking pictures, and writing up the post. The recipe was quite aโ€ฆ

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Seedy Furikake Crackers

Iโ€™ve been out and about, here and there, but one thing that seems to follow me around is furikake. โ€œWhat? A Japanese seaweed-based condiment?โ€ you might say. While I do tend to tote French salted butter, fleur de sel, and Dijon mustard along with me on my travels, Iโ€™ve always loved furikake as well, and find myself craving it more and more these days. Inโ€ฆ

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Brined, Roast Pork

Iโ€™m often asked what my favorite cookbooks are and invariably I pull out a copy of The Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rodgers. Itโ€™s one of those rare books where you learn something from every sentence on every page, and in every recipe that you make from it. Judy was an amazing cook and whatever she made was unusually good, in spite of its (seemingly)โ€ฆ

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Peanut Butter Chocolate Brownie Bars

Welcome to 2021. We had sort of, umโ€ฆan 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 fromโ€ฆ

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Chocolate Marshmallows

Marshmallows are one (or some) of my favorite things. We donโ€™t often use โ€˜marshmallowโ€™ in the singular and we certainly donโ€™t make them one at a time. When we talk about marshmallows, itโ€™s generally in the plural since itโ€™s hard to imagine just one, lone, solitary marshmallow. That would be triste, as youโ€™d say in French, or sad. Except, of course, when itโ€™s floating onโ€ฆ

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Black Fruitcake

Over the last several years, people suggested that I write a book of fruit desserts. I point out, helpfully, that I already have, but every year a few books of fruit desserts come out, mostly relating to pies or crisps and cobblers. So it was interesting to see one devoted solely to cakes, called (appropriately) Fruit Cake: Recipes for the Curious Baker. But no needโ€ฆ

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