This year was a good year for baking books. I didn’t get to see them all, or bake from them, but one that I got a preview of before it was released was Dessert Person by Claire Saffitz. She may be familiar to you because of her tenure in the test kitchen at Bon Appétit and more recently, her very popular online videos, but reading…
This quirky cocktail brings together three disparate ingredients; tequila, Chartreuse, and Amer Picon, to create the Jaguar, a drink that hews on the bitter side, with a bit of intrigue from the tequila, and the herbal punch of Chartreuse. I couldn’t find much intel on the origin of this cocktail*, and how these three ingredients found their way into the same glass. Some information on…
I’ll admit to being the kind of guy that likes a pink drink every now and then, but I don’t like to admit that I’m the kind of guy that buys raspberries in the winter. Writing cookbooks with deadlines that don’t always flow with the seasons, if I need a few cherries in the winter to test a recipe or a few cups of blueberries,…
One French dish I’ve not made is Tartiflette. It’s one of those things that you tuck into after a day of skiing down alps, which I did once with a family of expert skiers, realizing too late that my intermediate-level of skiing was no match for my friends, who pointed their skis straight down the top of the alps and took off. I tried my…
I decided this year I was going to make peace with my slow cooker. I was surprised by how much I didn’t take to it, which I’ve documented here and there. Like bread machines, Instant Pots, Thermomix, and cast irons skillets, someone wrote about the latter on my Facebook page, “It’s just a PAN…” (in all-caps), they certainly have their fans. I do like my…
Marshmallows are one (or some) of my favorite things. We don’t often use ‘marshmallow’ in the singular and we certainly don’t make them one at a time. When we talk about marshmallows, it’s generally in the plural since it’s hard to imagine just one, lone, solitary marshmallow. That would be triste, as you’d say in French, or sad. Except, of course, when it’s floating on…
‘Tis the season for holiday baking and I’ll admit to being on a little bit of a fruitcake bender, recently giving a Black Fruitcake a go and revisiting one of my all-time favorite recipes, Fruitcake Bars which won accolades from several French friends. (They were also surprised at how easy there were to make, too.) A while back, I gave the much-maligned fruitcake a makeover,…
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 need…
One thing I’ve been working on this year, which may be remembered in the future as “the year we all stayed home,” is updating blog posts. Quite a few of them that were written, say ten…or fifteen years ago, benefitted from being reformatted and tightened up. Blogging was a lot more casual way back when, and as I make (and remake) recipes, I often tweak…
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