When I lived in San Francisco, I used to stop at Whole Foods occasionally and frequent the salad bar. Because I’m a big fan of cookies, I’d often grab a cookie for dessert. One day I noticed big, cushy-looking gingersnaps amongst all the other cookies, and picked one out. After finishing my salad, I took the cookie out of the slender brown bag and took a…
This week in Paris we had our first snowfall. I was at the dentist, and when I came out, the sidewalks were damp from the wet rain that had fallen while I’d had my semi-annual detartrage. Then, as I walked up the rue Montorgueil, the annoying rain turned to little icy bits, then to large snowflakes, dusting everything, from the brick sidewalks, then coating my…
I promised a bunch of holiday-friendly recipes this month, and this one is a doozy! Peanut butter cookies, filled with salted peanut caramel—do those sound as good to you as they do to me? The recipe is from The Art and Soul of Baking by Cindy Mushet, who is one of America’s best bakers. Her name might not be on the edge of your tongue,…
[Update: As of October 2019, City Bakery has closed.] Here’s what I like best about The City Bakery: anything you order is going to be first-rate. There’s a thin, flaky apple tart with a hint of tangy lemon and lots of crackly sugar. The chocolate cookie is soft and bursting with deep, dark chocolate flavor. And the dreamy chocolate tartlet is simple and direct: a…
It seems like there’s a wave of macaron questions that are sweeping my way. Unlike les brownies or le gâteau weekend (poundcake), successful macarons are more the result of the technique, rather than following a mere recipe. There’s lots of tips and tricks around the web that will help you out with these little devils, including some interesting recipes, too. You can find my chocolate…
Yet another friend is moving back to the states (woosies!) and she had a going away party last night on one of the bridges over the Seine. Since I’d stashed a few clandestine bags of marshmallows, which were getting a little long in the tooth, I thought it time to use ’em or lose ’em. In fact, they were a prominent staple on my Too…
Last week, I was making my weekly ice cream deliveries to the vendors at my local market, which was especially necessary since my freezer was super jam-packed and begging for relief. (Which you may have seen when I inadvertently bared-all in my kitchen slide show.) When I stopped by to drop off a pint to my pal Régis, who sells salt at the market, I…
If I had to name my top three desserts, in that too-brief list would be Black & White Cookies. I can’t visit New York without having at least one per day, although it’s getting tougher and tougher to find a decent one there. On my last trip I found a lot of shrink-wrapped cookies, but there’s nothing like biting into a jumbo-sized fluffy disk of…
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…
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