LoveTheJourney

For all those who’ve put off getting their hands dirty with laminated doughs, kouign amann is a great place to start. Somewhere between a bread and a Danish, it only requires a couple of “turns” of the dough, and they need not be perfect. This is a rustic pastry, so your standards need not be [...]

This post is all about housekeeping. I’ve received quite a few requests for a pâte brisée recipe lately. I’ve had one on the site for quite a while now, but it’s been filed under “quiche.” This dedicated post on the subject will make it easier to reference.
Pâte brisée is one of the simplest of [...]

As with most classic pastry preparations, ladyfinger recipes tend to be fairly consistent. This one might have an extra egg yolk, that one a little more vanilla, but overall they tend to be quite similar. The only major area of disagreement you’ll find between them is the type of flour they call for. Some demand [...]

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 [...]

Troll around the web and you’ll find all sorts of overwrought beignet recipes, loaded down with eggs, butter, sugar, even evaporated milk. They’re all rather misguided to my way of seeing things. Though New Orleans beignets resemble doughnuts in many resects, they shouldn’t actually be doughnuts. Rather, they should be light and airy little frivolities [...]

Biscuits, strawberries, whipped cream. Those are the base components of a classic strawberry shortcake. I vary it a little by using Chantilly cream which is a more indulgent version of whipped cream: heavy cream whipped with sugar and vanilla extract. The biscuits are a variation of my go-to recipe, but sweeter and with hard-cooked egg [...]

It occurred to me that this would be the perfect recipe for a week devoted to the subject of salt. These tantalizingly salty chocolate cookies are a type of sablé (“sandy”) cookie originally created by Pierre Hermé. The recipe was translated to English by Dorie Greenspan, and appeared in her book Paris Sweets. There, Greenspan [...]

A great lemon bar should have a no-nonsense tart-sweet curd filling above and a flaky-yet-firm short bread crust below. The two together create an experience that approaches religious.
The secret to lemon bars isn’t in the ingredients per se (a top-notch lemon curd filling is defined more by what you leave out of it than [...]

So then, imagine you’re a military rations purveyor to the US government circa 1865. The Civil War just ended and your hardtack business has tanked. You’ve got dozens of hard-earned dollars invested in your state-of-the-art baking equipment and need to find a way to re-purpose it for peacetime use. Could crackers be mass-marketed to ordinary [...]