When I ask my son these days what he likes to have for dinner, his answer will almost always be spaghetti & bolognese sauce. It was among the dishes almost perpetually simmering on my stove lately, when most of May and even June rather felt like rainy, misty autumn days and there was so much rain […]
Category: cakes & tarts
Kouglof aux pralinés roses
As much as I love baking tarts and cakes, there´s nothing like baking with yeast. Transforming flour, butter, sugar, eggs and milk into golden crusted loaves, just by adding a few crumbles of yeast – this act will never lose its magic to me, no matter how often I perform it. Each and every time I cherish that incomparable mix of joy and relief when […]
Parlez-vous franglais? Cake tout citron
Franglais – what charming coinage, a fusion of français and anglais, to describe a French scattered with English words. The longer I´ve lived in France, the more I realize how many anglicisms are actually used in every day speech. I´ve always thought French was relatively free from anglo-saxon imports, with French terms being used where the […]
Strawberry mascarpone tartlets
On sundays, we often drive through Paris and stop at one of the countless parks, one of my favorites being Park Monceau in the 17th arrondissement. The neighbourhood surrounding is as elegant as the park itself: small, but merveilleux, a true gem with old trees, a small pond and perhaps the most beautiful manège (merry-go-round) of Paris. I […]
Baba au rhum
It´s not that long ago since I tasted a Baba au rhum for the first time. Since childhood days, this had been the forbidden cake. As a little girl, I had seen the baba at the pâtisseries whenever I would go to France with my parents do some food shopping (I grew up in a corner of Germany […]
As dark as it gets: chocolate chili tartelettes
Try that! I bet you´ve never had hot chocolate made from a two thousand year old recipe! – When I came home all cold and wet the other day, caught off-guard by one of those hard to foresee (at least for me) Parisian rainshowers, that scene from Chocolat came to my mind: In the movie, […]
The green cake – Le gâteau vert de Claude Monet
Leave Paris by car and it won´t take long until you´ll find yourself in the middle of the French countryside and eventually, after an hour or so, reach the small village of Giverny, home to the painter Claude Monet for well over four decades. Until his death in 1926, here he found inspiration and calm to consecrate himself […]
red currant meringue tartelettes
“Gathering the golden harvest through long summer days leaves a lasting sweetness to ripen in a man’s soul. The smell of newly carted hay can be a lasting memory even in strange cities.” Margaret Campbell Barnes When I was a child, the season of red currants would mark one of the highlights of summer. In a […]
