Food and Wine magazine had a great take on a travel cake recently – those mouthwatering little cakes you find all over Europe in bakeshops and patisseries, meant for picnics, road trips, or charming hostess gifts. This recipe is for an almond, elderflower and lime cake, and they remind me of the little cakes my Bohemian grandmother used to make when the city relatives would come to visit us country cousins. These cakes can be flavored any way you like […]
A jam heart is the kind of cookie you’d expect to find resting on a lace doily beside a steaming cup of tea. They look more complicated than they are: all you need are two sizes of the same-shaped cookie cutter, sugar cookie dough, raspberry jam, and powdered sugar. The original Linzer hearts have ground nuts in the dough, are rolled out very thinly, and look exquisitely perfect, but this heart recipe is the kind of cookie that you want […]
Now that we’ve all become used to dark chocolate in a multitude of cacao percentages with elaborate flavors cleverly added for extra oomph, look what’s making a comeback – milk chocolate! How we’ve missed you! The smoothness and sweetness that literally melts in your mouth is a happy, long-forgotten childhood memory. I saw this recipe in a Gourmet magazine issue on comfort foods and was immediately drawn to it. With all of us food bloggers bent on creating new and […]
The first time I met Bill Yosses he was interviewing for the position of White House pastry chef. The Chief Usher, Gary Walters, and I had been interviewing pastry chefs for a couple of months and I was struck by Bill’s easy self-confidence and positive attitude. Then he baked for the Bushes (Gary and I taste-tested also) and everyone was sold. He went on to expand his skills even further in the Obama White House, where he found new and […]
Everyone loves homemade chocolate chip cookies. It’s almost impossible to make a bad one. But it’s natural to be curious about the other chocolate chip cookie recipes out there. If there’s an ingredient that hasn’t been folded into the recipe for novelty’s sake at this point (bacon, chocolate, cherries), I can’t imagine what it is. Garlic, maybe. But what if you gave a chocolate chip cookie recipe the kind of close attention and precision you’d give a soufflé or sourdough […]
