cookbook addict

Religieuse minimaliste Ah, l'éclair au chocolat, ma pâtisserie du dimanche préférée... ça me rappelle mon enfance, les déjeuners du dimanche en famille et ma grand-mère qui apportait souvent un assortiment de pâtisseries pour le dessert. Que des bons souvenirs! Et si j'aimais les éclairs en particuliers, c'est que toute l'architecture molle, craquante et sucrée, et chocolatée me plaisait. J'aimais moins les religieuses car le gros chou avait une proportion de crème trop importante par rapport à la pâte, et puis les rosettes de crème au beurre, c'était pas trop mon truc non plus. Chocolate éclairs are my favourite pastry. They remind me of my childhood, when my grandmother used to bring an assortment of pastries from the shop for dessert after our family Sunday lunch. Good times! I had a soft spot for éclairs and their sweet, crunchy but soft, chocolatey architecture (French éclairs are filled with pastry cream, not whipped cream). I liked religieuses le...

 English in italics! La Sachertorte est le gâteau culte de l'Autriche. La recette est jalousement gardée par la maison Sacher mais bien sûr les variations sur son thème sont nombreuses. Intrigués par ce pseudo mystère, et passant devant le Café Sacher lors de notre visite à Innsbruck (l'original se trouvant à Vienne), nous avons décidé d'y faire une halte. Sachertorte is Austria's cult cake. The recipe is kept secret by the Sacher house but of course, numerous variations of the recipe circulate. Intrigued by this pseudo mystery, and walking by the Café Sacher during our visit to Innsbruck (the original one is in Vienna), we decided to stop by for refreshments, as it were. Le cadre luxueux prout-prou t traditionnel ne se prête pas forcément à une visite avec des enfants et avec un blouson de ski sur le dos, mais comme dans toutes les bonnes maisons, on vous reçoit comme si vous portiez du Chanel -ils sont habitués aux touristes. The luxurious uptight tradi...

Valentine's Day. Love? Hate? Indifferent? I thought we'd celebrate at home then changed my mind only to find out that our baby-sitter is unavailable tomorrow. Bah, nevermind. I baked biscuits. This is an adaptation of Nigella's custard cream hearts recipe in Feast. You just substitute 25g of cocoa for the same amount of flour. Eva has the recipe posted here . If you were to eat the biscuits on their own, they are nice and crumbly and not very sweet. Once they are sandwiched with the custard cream, it becomes difficult to stop eating them. They look a bit rustic, which I like. I tried to make them look fancier using photo applications but that proved too much trouble to upload. I find they are a more realistic representation of love in daily life. Not photoshop perfect!

I cannot believe I let so much time go before I finally got down to writing about this book. It was on my wishlist for the longest time before it came out because of an article I had read in Bon Appetit and all the blog hype surrounding the crack pie . The book tells the fascinating story of how Christina Tosi, the mastermind behind the Momofuku Milk Bar creations (in New York), came to fame with her childhood inspired desserts. Most recipes have sprouted from her love of baking and her use of cupboards staples to achieve crazy concoctions. You love the funfetti cake mix? Eating pretzels with chocolate? Imagine a giant cheesecake-filled cinnamon bun? It's all in there. Instead of using cake mix, you're going to learn the hard way how to make your own, how to use milk powder as a flavour enhancer for sweets, how to turn cornflakes into what they were meant to become after a century of kitchen evolution, how to make the crack pie, etc. If you're into easy baking, the...

Scroll down for English! La St Valentin approche. Pour les uns, le cliché le plus dégoulinant, commercial et j'en passe. Pour les autres, l'occasion de se donner rendez-vous en amoureux. Pas génial cette année vu que c'est un lundi. Je n'ai encore rien de prévu, mais j'ai des Happy Potatoes au congélo, des saucisses et je sens bien une St-Valentin spécial calories et comfort food, profitons encore un peu de l'hiver qui s'étiole pour masquer nos bourrelets. Ah ah! Il se peut aussi que j'achète des noix (de St-Jacques) et un bon Gewürz... Puis, pour faire passer le tout, un bon gros gâteau au chocolat, enfin, s'il en reste! Cette recette est issue du magazine Marmiton. Je suis tombée dessus par hasard alors que j'avais passé la frontière pour aller faire mes courses côté français pour changer -ma vie est passionnante, je sais. Comme j'étais une des premières fans de marmiton, je l'ai feuilleté puis acheté. Maintenant je consulte r...

Oh, hello! Second post of the day, who'd have thought? Are you like me? Do you always wait until the last minute to get stuff done? I prepared those babies yesterday to give them to the teacher at Kindergarten today, only to hear that schools stayed closed today because of the snow. My neighbour was cleverer and gave the teacher her present yesterday -we had been warned of the heavy snowfall after all... Anyway, perhaps I'll drive to her house to deliver them tomorrow but then she may think I'm stalking her... or I could just give them to other people or, or gobble them up myself -no big sacrifice. We have here some chocolate- caramel truffles that I blogged about aeons ago. They are from my Larousse des Desserts, a Pierre Hermé work. A bit more fiddly than plain truffles but so much worth the little extra effort. The caramel hint is subtle, even the kids like them, and they are a nice balance of dark and milk chocolate as not to offend any palate. I didn't want ...

Dear Reader, I have let you down. Seriously, I haven't posted in over two months, where has the time gone? Anyway, it hasn't been too exciting, or perhaps I haven't had much energy to cook and write. I have fed the other blog a little (it's easier in French I guess), but I have fed myself well (a little too well probably). Anyway, I offer you this recipe for a microwave chocolate cake, just because it's dead easy and super quick to whip up, even if a three-year-old is helping. It's not mine, it's from the other Julie , the stick insect one, a pretty, popular, pretty popular thin TV cook. -do you hear the envy in my italics?- It's done the rounds on French blogs, because we don't cook much with our microwaves, let alone bake with them, and this cake is surprisingly good, considering. It won't rise, and only fills half a standard loaf pan, but it's dense, intense and impossible to resist. It's called "black cake", yes in English,...

The things we do when we are lonely... My loved one is away for work, my toddler threw another tantrum. It's raining... On the upside I haven't gained weight over the past four weeks (whereas I put on 4 kilos in 6 weeks between July and early August -if you're are here for the first time and wondering, I'm pregnant, that's all). Well, if they checked my weight right now it might have suddenly and very dramatically increased after sampling one time too many these outrageously delicious biscuits, but let's not think of such things, lest I reach one more time for them. I have long lusted after this recipe, and ignored my lust because I thought it contained a hideous amount of butter and sugar. Plus I wanted to have an opportunity to bake for a larger number of people. As it turned out, I baked this on a lonely afternoon with a view to stash most of the results in the freezer. Mid-week too. Before I started, I did some research and could find not one single lighter ...

Another recipe taken from Nigella Express , this time with the instructions. Nigella borrowed it from Elinor Klivans, author of Big, Fat Cookies . It may make you want to buy that book. Personally, I try to resist such temptations, sometimes. There is a little confusion between the recipe in Nigella's book and the original recipe which I found online with both sets of measurements, so in the end, rather than giving you NE's metric ones and both of the others, I just wrote Nigella's first, then the American cup version. I made about eighteen cookies with a good size, you can choose to make them bigger or smaller. They're really intensely cocoa-rich, especially as I used (natch) my stash of Paris-bought Valrhona bitter 70% chocolate called Guanaja. I don't know how they'd fare with kids, but with us, grown-ups, they didn't last very long, especially if feeling hormonally unbalanced. Don't bake them for as long as the recipe stipulates, I found it too much ...

Until now, my all-time favourite brownies were English. They came from Nigel Slater and were called unashamedly, "my very good brownie recipe" or "24-carat brownies". I still love them, but I have found a worthy contender for the best brownie recipe. Nigel Slater. His wit, humour, attention to the little details that make life a pleasant experience. I used to wake up early and cycle to the Munich Central Station to buy a copy of the Observer to be able to read his weekly column of a Sunday. His brownies are fantastic, taste a thousand times better than the one he recommended from Borough Market in London. BUT, admit it, if you've tried making them, the recipe is a tad fiddly. You end up with lots of washing up and have to scramble around the kitchen melting chocolate, beating butter and sugar, adding cocoa, flour, blah blah. The challenger recipe came from Cook's Illustrated. I was really intrigued by the concept of a magazine without any colour photographs,...

I love brownies, always have, and always will. And what's not to like in a brownie? Deep, dark chocolate, crunchy (healthful) nuts, butter, eggs (organic), brown sugar...a melting square of fudgy goodness. Until now, my favourite recipe has been Nigel Slater's 24-carat one. Such gloriously decadent, dense, melt-in-the-mouth, chocolatey pieces. Nigella's aren't bad either. There are so many new recipes for me to try (I'm thinking Jamie Oliver's Fifteen brownies, Maida Heatter's Palm Beach brownies, one out of Olive magazine...) so why did my choice for today end up being Dorie Greenspan's classic ones? Well, I recently received her new book Baking from my home to yours , and as I started a diet not long afterwards, haven't had many opportunities to try anything out of this chunky, beautiful book. This weekend, my diet has faltered a bit, I have had bad PMS and felt in need of a chocolate fix/treat. So this was perfect, since one batch is not so monu...

Ireland enjoys a favourable reputation worldwide and is a beloved spot for backpackers and lovers of green, if misty, landscapes. The Irish are generally hospitable and love a bit of craic (fun). The land has changed rather dramatically between my first and my last visits, respectively 1995 and 2004, benefiting from an economic boom and the wealth that goes with it. Hence there are more cars, modern houses and high prices for everything, but that's nothing new for the inhabitant of the Eurozone. Still, it's worth a visit as it still has lots of charm. This chocolate Guinness cupcake is somewhat misleading in its Valentine's attire, but that is a long story. The recipe is here , or in Feast if you own it,and if you don't, you should. I halved the proportions and ended up with 12 medium-sized cupcakes. Didn't bother to ice them. They are nice little chocolate cakes, but I am afraid they are nothing special for the chocolate cake lover, but that may be because I used...

This is my first participation to Sugar High Friday, a blogging game created by Jennifer, the Domestic Goddess , and this time organized by David Leibovitz , Un Américain à Paris, lover of good food and chocolate connaisseur. David invited us to make a chocolate dessert using a brand we'd proceed to describe. Living in France, I sometimes use Cémoi organic and fair trade dessert chocolate, which isn't always available where I shop. It is really great for baking as it has 64% cocoa and also gives me a good conscience, which is perfect when one idulges in a piece of chocolate heaven... OK, I'll confess I also use Nestlé, which I'm told isn't so conscience-absolving. I particularly appreciate their dessert milk chocolate, also to be eaten as is, as it is rich in cocoa and not overly sweet, perfect for chipping. They also have a good strong(er) dessert chocolate (Corsé, the dark brown) which is better than their regular one. But on to today's chocolate, Lindt Desser...

En français la semaine prochaine pour ceux qui veulent! A wonderful cake for greedy chocoholics, this recipe is taken from Feast by the Honourable Nigella Lawson and is the easiest cake in the Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame chapter of the book, since it can be made using a food processor. I didn't , but still, it was easy enough. For those of you who don't own a copy of Feast, you can now buy it in paperback, it would be a shame to do without it, as it has so many great recipes for all occasions. The book says it makes 8 slices, but my friends and I thought an eighth was nearly too much, and an eighth is definitely OTT as a dessert. If you've ever made her chocolate fudge cake (from Nigella Bites, a delight too) though, you'll agree that this one is way easier to eat. Cake 200g flour 200g sugar 1 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp nbicarbonate of soda 40g unsweetened cocoa 175g soft butter 2 eggs 2 tsps vanilla extract 150ml sour cream or crème fraîche and yogurt Whizz everything ...

En français ici I love a good brownie but let's face it, they're calorie bombs, especially the good ones. Brownies made their appearance in France about twenty years ago, in the form of supermarket-sold, individually-wrapped pieces of crap. Then recipes sprouted everywhere in magazines and books. My first brownie recipe, still usable and good, came from my then favourite teeny mag, 20 ANS, then a schoolfriend (male) teased me with his butter-laden and quite authentic recipe -also good, but I won't tell you what I had to do to get it (joking). Then many moons later, I discovered Nigella's, and (sorry Nigella) lately, Nigel Slater's unbeatable 24-carat, very good brownie rec ipe . For brownies, like for cookies, every cook has their own recipe. Try every forum and launch a thread about them, you'll end up with as many suggestions as there are posts. Some include chocolate, some just plain cocoa, some both, most recipes are indulgent and buttery, one may add nut...

Scroll down to read in English... Ami(e) lecteur (-trice), je te salue et te laisse cette petite recette du Larousse des Desserts, signé par PH himself en te souhaitant de ne pas trop t'ennuyer sans moi pendant mes vacances. J'espère bien trouver un spot wifi quelque part dans le désert aride que constituent et l'Aveyron et l'Hérault. Pendant que je me bourrerai de fritons, jambon de pays, fouace et autres olives ou pastis (le gâteau, je précise) tout en essayant de rester canon pour la plage (ne t'en fais pas, j'ai un maillot de grossesse Kiabi qui fera l'affaire si je venais à déborder de mon bikini Ursulaandresque Quiksilver -période James Bond), bref, pendant ce temps, pense un peu à moi et amuse-toi bien quand même... Pour le sorbet, il faut faire un sirop avec 60cl d'eau et 220g de sucre , puis y verser 220g de chocolat à 70% râpé (je sais, c'est casse-pieds, utilises ton KA ou coupe le menu menu). Reporter à ébullition et laisser refroidir a...

Ceci n'est pas une publicité pour une marque de balances. Une recette intrigante de pain au lait et au cacao dont Tessa Kiros ( encore et toujours) nous dit qu'il ne faut pas s'y méprendre et laisser penser aux goûteurs qu'il s'agit d'un gâteau...en effet, il est peu sucré voire même un peu amer, et ceux qui préfèrent un goût plus chocolaté doivent absolument rajouter du sucre. Mais il est bon tel quel, beurré et tartiné de confiture, de Nutella ou saupoudré de cacao sucré. Sa texture est moelleuse et fondante. Pour un pain: 1,5 cc de levure de boulanger déshydratée 310ml lait 40g de sucre 400g de farine blanche ou bise 50g de cacao non sucré (pas du hollandais, mais à essayer) 1/2 cc de sel 40g de beurre Faire tiédir le lait et y verser le sucre et la levure, bien remuer et laisser à couvert pendant une dizaine de minutes le temps que se fo...