When I worked in the restaurant business, if you happened to walk in during staff meal, you could always tell who were the pastry people: we were the ones dousing our food with vinegar and salt. That is, when we had time to sit down and eat. I like sweets, but I like them tempered with something not-necessarily sweet, which is why sometimes you’ll see…
Over the years, I’ve gotten many questions about substituting ingredients in recipes. Other times, people want to reduce quantities of ingredients. The main questions I get about substitutions are: Can I reduce the sugar in a recipe? How can I make a recipe gluten-free? Can I make this with a different kind of nut, or make it nut-free? What can I use in place of…
The fashionable team over at Design*Sponge came by to make a video with me here in Paris… I hit the market with Anne Ditmeyer of Prêt à Voyager, who is part of the Design*Sponge creative team, to do a little shopping. You can watch the video here. (Plus we got a little lesson of how far a seller will go not to sell something to…
If I had to name one food that I couldn’t live without, chocolate would be right up there. Salted butter is on that short list, too. Seeded bagels, California dried apricots, black and white cookies, osetra caviar (if money, and sustainability, were no object), lobster rolls, French fries, and really good fried chicken would also be on that list. Not as fancy as some of…
Laura Adrian is half of the team behind Verjus, a wine bar in Paris that she runs with her partner Braden. With a little help from an adorable Boston Terrier that pops his head into the action every once in a while. Laura worked for one of my favorite bean-to-bar chocolate makers in America, Theo chocolate in Seattle, before moving to Paris. Due to word-of-mouth,…
If someone had to ask me – what would be my “desert island” cake, I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute. It’s this simple beauty. Although chocolate figures largely into the equation for many of my favorite desserts, as much as I love Chocolate Orbit Cake, I’d have to pick this Almond Cake as the one that I would choose to sustain me through thick and thin. We made almond…
One of my favorite summertime memories was having Mint Chip Ice Cream back when I grew up in New England, which we ate outside and had ordered from a window at our local dairy. Even though the ice cream was freshly made, they made sure it bright-bright-green, so we knew we were eating mint, I suppose. I remember a few years later, after the dairy…
Am glad to hear, and read, that many of you are enjoying the Chocolate Chip Cookies from Ready for Dessert. Just a quick note that the recipe (page 188) calls for adding “…bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, coarsely chopped.” They should resemble these. I prefer hand-chopped chocolate since the chunks melt nicely in the cookies, and folks should add all the chocolate—including the tiny bits and…
When I got the opportunity to re-release my first two books, which had gone out of print, my publisher and I decided that they should be combined into one brand-new volume, Ready for Dessert, with new photos and more than a dozen new recipes added. So I made a master list of all the recipes, then chose my absolute favorites: the ones I’d found myself…
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