Confectioner's custard (Crème pâtissière, or French pastry cream)

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Quite similar to crème anglaise but much thicker. It is used in many pastries like choux pastry (pâte à choux) or millefeuille.

Breton galettes (pancakes)

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Of uniquely Breton origin, this is a buckwheat pancake on which you cook an egg with ham and cheese before folding it over. Easy and quick to make, it's an ideal answer to the question "what are we going to eat this evening?".

French croissants

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In this famous and highly technical recipe from a piece of yeast-based flaky dough we are going to cut and shape ("roll") croissants.

Fish fillet in express cooking envelope

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Vegetables cut in small dice and precooked, fish fillet, lemon juice, olive oil, and 2 minutes in the microwave.

Strawberries with mint and cream

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Minty confectioner's custard, diced strawberries and whipped cream.

Brioche feuilletée (flaky brioche)

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For brioche feuilletée (or flaky brioche), the brioche dough is treated like puff pastry, with layers of butter incorporated by repeated turning and rolling. Coarse sugar crystals add a sweet crunchiness. Needless to say, this is very rich and quite irresistible.

Yeast-based flaky dough (for croissants)

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This yeast-based flaky dough (or croissant dough) is where puff pastry meets a yeast dough (such as brioche dough). This means that not only will we get flaky layers, but the dough will also swell and rise. The method is along the same lines as for a feuilletage: the basic dough is first kneaded, then layered with butter and folded over several times (in "turns") to give it its flakiness. This is a highly technical dough and quite tricky to make well at home by hand, with a rolling pin. But...

Chocolate mousse with hazelnuts

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Here is a marvellous new chocolate mousse recipe that will delight real chocoholics. This is a rich, gourmet version, though not over-sweet and with the added crunchy texture of toasted hazelnuts. You'll love this one!

Algerian brik rolls

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In this recipe, the brik (or filo) rolls are filled with fried minced meat, flavoured with cous-cous spices, garlic and onion.

Spinach brik parcels

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Crispy brik parcels, filled with a mixture of spinach, feta and chopped shallot.

Verrine of avocado mousse and crab

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A layer of light avocado mousse on a bed of crab meat in a herb rémoulade dressing.

Naan

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Naan is a type of Asian bread made from wheat flour. This kind comes from the Punjab region of India.

St Tropez tart

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This famous dessert from St Tropez is more of a cake than a tart. The sugar-sprinkled brioche layers are sandwiched together with a rich vanilla filling which is a mixture of confectioner's custard and whipped cream.

Peach and verbena feuilleté

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In French, a "feuilleté" can be anything, sweet or savoury, wrapped in or with a base of puff pastry, from a sausage roll to a millefeuille. This is an elegant tart-style feuilleté with a caramelized pastry base, topped with a light custard flavoured with verbena. This is based on a confectioner's custard (french pastry cream), lightened with meringue. On this bed of delicious custard, the finishing touch is a double rosette of peeled fresh peach slices.

European glass

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A little dessert that's rather long to make, but which will always impress your guests. Layered in a glass: a jellied red fruit coulis, a layer of pineapple charlotte cream, a layer of kiwi coulis, topped with a peeled clementine segment. It's "european" because it resembles the italian flag, and in another version with apricot instead raspberries, the irish flag (a country so dear to me).

Mousse with two chocolates

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Chocolate mousse is a great classic home-made dessert. Here's a version using two different chocolates (dark and milk) with a hint of vanilla, that owes much to a recipe by Christophe Michalak.

Clementines and chestnuts entremet

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For this beautiful dessert, we place a disc of clementine cream on a chestnut dacquoise cookie. We will use the technique of the insert taken in the cold for this recipe, and thus to obtain easily a very beautiful dessert.

Crispy potato and mushroom brik rolls

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These crispy rolls have a mashed potato filling with mushrooms and herbs.

Boulangère tart tatin with vine nectarines

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You may already be familiar with the famous apple tarte tatin, but here's a very tasty bakery version, with vine nectarines and croissant dough.

Baked Alaska

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The name may be odd, but Baked Alaska is an elegant dessert. The core of this version is a "sandwich" of vanilla ice cream and blackcurrant sorbet between 2 layers of sponge soaked in rum-flavoured syrup. This is then covered in a layer of meringue and put in a very hot oven for just a few minutes to brown the outside. The magical and delicious effect comes from the contrast between the hot meringue and the cold ice cream and cake inside. It is a little tricky to get right, but the main...

Making your own bread

You'll find a whole range of bread and pastry recipes on this site, but before you get started, perhaps you'd like to know more about the subject, get some tips and tricks, and find out what the main mistakes beginners make? If so, this page is for you.
August 22^th 2024579 K 63.9

Finishing touches

Is an oven really ever finished? Well there are always ideas for improvements. Here are af few...
August 30^th 202479 K4.4

Bay leaf: small in size, but big in flavor. You'll find it in hundreds of recipes, and it's often added to cooking meat, in a sauce or broth, usually accompanied by other herbs or products. It's a staple of Provençal, Mediterranean and Oriental cuisine, but not the only one. Usually, in a...
July 31^th 20258,6465

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 20253,177