I was in the process of having the site moved to a new server when, er…something happened, no one seems to know what. Except that the thing got all messed up. I wasn’t going to be posting for several days anyway while the move happened, but this is a more embarrassing version of what I […]
READ ON1. Use good – not necessarily great – ingredients. All good food starts with good ingredients, in the case of pastry, decent flour, decent sugar (I like cane for most things), decent fruit and chocolate. Find good, reasonably priced sources and don’t go overboard. No need to pay up unless the ingredient is playing a […]
READ ONThis coming Tuesday is Annual Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s, so plan your week accordingly. Find your nearest Ben & Jerry’s with their store locator here.
READ ONRemember my little anti-Tuscan olive oil rant from a few days back? Actually it wasn’t so much a rant as a statement of opinion. Well when I wrote that I was forgetting that my mother-in-law is going to be shelling out some big dollars for a trip to Tuscany this summer (the centerpiece of which […]
READ ONOne thing that can be said definitively about crème fraîche is that while it may indeed be crème, it is by no means fraîche. In fact it’s sour, very very similar in taste and texture to sour cream, though with some important functional differences. Crème fraîche’s main difference is that like just about everything French, […]
READ ONYou know all those things you eat that are going to kill you? The ones you’re on all those diets to avoid? Well now it turns out that the act of dieting itself is going to kill you. Might as well just eat the Twinkie now and go out with a smile on your face. […]
READ ONWould you believe I was once a big t’ai chi practitioner? But I gave it up. Way too soon it seems. Way too soon.
READ ONI was little more than a kid, but I can still recall that bitter conflict as if it were only yesterday: elf versus granny, granny versus peanut man, peanut man versus pretty much everybody else. It was a dark and ugly period of retail baking history. I was a mere foot soldier in 1982, a […]
READ ONYou said this was a couscous cake but there’s flour in it! What gives? Well yes that’s right, there is finely milled (and bolted) flour in this cake recipe. But then I should point out that most of the other couscous “cake” recipes you see out there aren’t really cakes in the way that we […]
READ ONI hope everyone of the Christian persuasion had a terrific Easter weekend (and all others did the same but, you know, without the Easter bit). Speaking for the Pastry household, the E.B. was good to us, and spread plenty of colored eggs and candy around. Little Joan got healthy in the bargain, which was the […]
READ ON