Author: joepastry

Joe’s Book Club

…has been reorganized and updated to reflect some critical omissions as well as some key reader recommendations. I know it looks like a lot of books, and I guess it is, but I’ve tried to prioritize them by category, the most critical titles at the top of each list. If you’re a beginner, you could […]

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Science!

I know I’ve been on a serious history jag these last couple of weeks, most of it in the French revolutionary period. For all of you who are missing the serious science, I promise to put my lab coat back on first thing Monday morning. Until then have a great weekend!

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Look, don’t touch.

Canny readers may have uncovered something of a contradiction between this last post and some of last week’s posts on Antonin Carême. Specifically, that Carême spent his entire early career fashioning giant pastries for the centers of service à la française tables. So if grand pastries were a fixture of dessert services in those days, […]

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Hey…

How did I get onto layer cakes when I started out the week declaring that a true cake was a single-layer affair? I told you this topic was treacherous. But just for the record, while I know that some may interpret this week’s yellow cake recipe as a layer cake recipe, as far as I’m […]

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Cake Fake-Out

The one big thing that discourages more would-be cake bakers is that they feel they can’t reproduce the thick, even layers that they see professionals working with in bakeries and on TV. Here beginners are at a built-in disadvantage since most recipes (to say nothing of most cake mixes) just aren’t designed to produce layers […]

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American Idols

I had a pleasant surprise watching the Food Network last night. An episode of their reality/competition show Food Network Challenge came on, this time pitting five teams of cake decorators against each other to create a winning multi-tier “celebration cake” in just eight hours. Now I tend to be pretty skeptical of the whole “reality […]

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Cakes on the Edge

If you’ve followed the site for a while you know my feelings on Food TV’s Sugar Rush. Great potential poorly used, with a strange penchant for explosions, flame and pastry that looks like anything but pastry. Well, now there’s a spinoff, Ace of Cakes featuring Sugar Rush‘s favorite pastry demolitions expert, Duff Goldman of Charm […]

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Le Grande Gabelle

I can’t let a mention of salt taxes pass by without taking a detour into the subject of the gabelle, the infamous French salt tax. The gabelle started in the year 1286 as a “temporary” commodity tax instigated by Phillip IV to finance his war against Naples. But then as anyone who’s ever driven the […]

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Missing Something

If you’ve ever made bread and left the salt out by mistake, you know what a critical omission salt really is, even in something as relatively bland as bread. You go from simple and mild to positively flavorless. Thus a lot of people are surprised when they first cut into a big crusty loaf of […]

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