LoveTheJourney

Several readers wrote in over the weekend to remind me that Bavarian creams come in more varieties than the basic version I did last week. That’s very true. The world of Bavarians is broad and diverse. There are literally dozens of crème anglaise Bavarians, eggless fruit Bavarians, non-dairy bavarians lightened with meringue instead of whipped [...]

Reader Barry wants to know why, since pastry cream (another custard) is thickened with starch, Bavarian cream is thickened with gelatin. That’s a great question, and one I’m not sure I can fully answer. My feeling as that in centuries past, pastry chefs used whatever thickeners were available to them, so there were no hard [...]

I was going to write about how to modify ladyfingers before putting up the tutorial, but I think it’ll be easier to show the recipe first, then talk about adjustments. Ladyfingers are a lot easier to make than this series of photos might make them appear. They require a few steps, but the batter is [...]

This is a fairly standard ladyfinger recipe that produces a nice general-purpose cookie. It’s quite similar to other sponge cakes like génoise, except that it contains no butter. You can of course mess with this basic formula to create different effects, and in the next couple of posts I’ll tell you how.
4 eggs, room [...]

Talk about something that brings me back to childhood. Taking a bite of these put me right back in Lillie’s kitchen, where my twin sister and I would watch her whip up meringue by hand on a flat egg board (she didn’t own a mixing machine of any kind). Lillie was an ample woman, and [...]

I was very lucky as a boy to live two doors down from the neighborhood baking queen. Her name was Lillie Lundstrom, a second-generation Swede whose cakes and cardamom rolls are still the stuff of legend on Lincoln Street. One of her lesser-known creations was this recipe for apricot bars, which takes the American concept [...]

Late last week reader Marciella sent in a question about marjolaine layers. In essence she asked: if these are supposed to be “meringues” why don’t the directions call for whipping the whites and the sugar together? I thought: well, that’s just an idiosyncrasy of marjolaine recipes. I’ve read through probably ten of them and not [...]

Earlier in the week I wrote that I was taking a “sponge cake” approach to my marjolaine. That term isn’t wholly accurate, since I think of a classic sponge cake as something quite fluffy, that employs egg yolks, etc. etc.
This “cake” isn’t that sort of affair. Compositionally it’s similar to a meringue, only with [...]

Ah yes, a good question indeed. Marjolaine is the invention of the late French master chef, Fernand Point, whose restaurant La Pyramide outside of Lyon was widely considered to be France’s premier eating establishment from the close of World War I up until Point’s death in 1955. It was there that Marjolaine was invented and [...]