That question from reader Phil H., and it’s good one. The thing is, in most of the English-speaking world, the term “petit four” refers to a very specific thing. That being a small, layered cake covered with poured fondant. Among the French, however, the term refers to an entire family of small sweets. The word […]

Regular reader and commenter Chana writes in with this: You see — you take a simple potato knish, change the dough a litte, fill it with something a little different, and everyone is screaming “you call that a knish? You call THAT a KNISH?? Are you crazy? That is NOT a KNISH!!” You take a […]

So. Two disks of almond meringue stuck together with a filling. Not terribly much to work with from a creative standpoint. Or at least that’s the conclusion Parisian pastry chefs seem to have collectively arrived at in the decades after Desfontaines’ innovation. For more than fifty years macarons remained pretty straightforward affairs. The meringue disks […]

Here are the kind of posts I’d be putting up if I were four inches tall, made of clay and living in a cardboard box. The techniques are amazingly similar. Terrific stuff. Thanks to reader Lisa H.!

What do macarons and macaroni have in common? Not much, other than the fact that they’re both made from pulverized ingredients (almonds and wheat, respectively). Though etymologists debate the subject, it’s thought by many that the Italian word maccheroni comes from an earlier Italian word, maccare that means “to reduce” or “make smaller.” The present […]

Macarons are such simple preparations, their origins are fairly easy to triangulate. Their principal ingredient is sugar, which means they date no further back than the Colonial period, the time when cane sugar was flowing in earnest from the West Indies. That supposition is bolstered by the fact that they are meringues, which means they […]

Tell an experienced gourmand that you’re planning on making macarons for your dinner party this weekend and he’ll look at you as though you’ve just announced you’re going to jump the Snake River Canyon on a rocket-propelled sky-cycle. You can’t! It’s too dangerous! Such is the aura of fear that has come to surround this […]

Here are two projects that I couldn’t resist lumping together since they’re ostensibly the same thing, at least to an etymologist. In practice of course they are very, very different. One — at least if it’s made by master pastry chef Pierre Hermé — is widely considered to be bakingdom’s ultimate one-bite delight. It’s also […]

Hope everyone celebrating Thanksgiving this past week had a terrific holiday. As for me, I want to offer my own thanks to yet another anonymous StumbleUponer whose posting of my jelly doughnut tutorial brought some 300,000 visitors to the site over the weekend. Now if I only could have persuaded each one of them to […]