Belle-helene in a glass

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It's a recipe where you make 4 layers of different creams in a small glass: vanilla cream, small dice of pear cooked in maple syrup, chocolate mousse and whipped cream. It should be served to your guests cool but not too cold .

Clarified butter

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This is a way of melting butter to eliminate all the impurities. The clarified butter can then be heated without spoiling, and is more digestible. It is ideal for cooking at high temperatures where small black specks would spoil the appearance, or for emulsified sauces like béarnaise or mousseline.

Chocolate mousse

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Here is a simple quick recipe for chocolate mousse. It is just necessary to be careful at the final stage, when mixing the melted chocolate and the beaten egg-whites.

How to add beaten eggs whites to a mixture

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It is common in cooking or pastry, having beaten whites mix preparation to another without making them completely fall, here are some tips to help you to.

Raw beetroot mousse with walnuts

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A lightly spiced mousse, made with raw beetroot, with a layer in the centre of finely diced beetroot and roughly chopped walnuts. Discover or rediscover the taste of raw beetroot, very special and so "earthy".

How to use gelatin

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Gelatin is a gelling agent use in some desserts where a rather firm texture is required when cold. It can also be used to stabilize a dessert (mousses especially) that you need to keep longer than usual.

Béarnaise sauce

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This very tasty sauce, flavoured with tarragon, chervil and shallot, with its hint of acidity, is perfect for grilled fish or meats. Its well-known as a difficult sauce, but here are all the tips that you need to succeed.

Chocolate cream with a crunch, irish coffee mousse

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This is a chocolate cream with chopped candied grapefruit peel and caramelized nuts added to give bit of crunch. The small pot of cream is topped with an Irish coffee mousse (flavours of coffee, fresh cream, sugar and whisky).

Little vanilla, clementine and chestnut verrines

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This is a fresh-flavoured verrine with 3 different flavoured layers: vanilla panna cotta, clementine and chestnut mousse.

Génoise (Genoa sponge)

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A Génoise (or Genoa sponge) is a very light and delicate cake. It is good on its own, but is more often used as the base for many different French-style gâteaux, with layers of mousse or cream between 2 (or more) layers of sponge. It is a tricky recipe to get right, rather technical, but here's a simple and very effective method.

Fraisier (French strawberry cake)

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This classic French patisserie is a delicious assembly of 2 layers of genoa sponge filled with strawberries and crème mousseline (confectioner's custard with butter). The sponge is soaked in strawberry syrup and the cake is topped with a thin layer of marzipan.

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.

Crème de foie gras

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This is a rather tricky recipe in which foie gras is used to make a savoury cream, similar to a crème brulée but - of course - without sugar and without caramelizing the top. Instead, it is topped with an espuma (a light hot foam) of potatoes, garnished with crispy morsels of serrano ham.

Pear charlotte

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A charlotte filled with pear mousse (made with whipped cream and pear coulis).

Chocolate Chantilly

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If we look at the more scientific side of Chantilly cream we can see that it's mainly cream, and cream is a mix of very small droplets of milk fat and water, which is called an emulsion. When we whip this emulsion, we incorporate air into it and so create a mousse or foam. In the end Chantilly is a foaming emulsion. The interest of this observation is that we can imagine doing the same not only with cream. We just need water and...

Foie gras Chantilly

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Chantilly is a method which is applied to cream of course, but also to other surprising ingredients. If we look at the more scientific side of Chantilly we can see that it's mainly cream, and cream is a mix of very small droplets of milk fat and water, which is called an emulsion. When we whip this emulsion, we incorporate air into it and so create a mousse or foam. In the end Chantilly is a foaming emulsion. The interest of this observation is that we can imagine doing the same not only with...

Smoked eggs

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This sophisticated, smoky flavoured starter consists of an egg yolk, heated in a bain-marie and a smoked cream mousse with a scattering of chives, served with a buttered-toast "soldier".

Quick Strawberry Millefeuille

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A millefeuille (which in french means "thousand sheets") is a delicious pâtisserie consisting of layers of puff or flaky pastry (pâte feuilletée) sandwiched together with cream, fruit, etc. In this recipe, we will be using sheets of caramelized brik or filo, which makes a delicious, light millefeuille, filled with strawberries and chantilly cream.

Fish Mousselines

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Mousselines are a lighter version of the classic French quenelles, but without breadcrumbs. They are poached first in fumet (fish stock), then served "en gratin" in sauce normande.

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!

The 3 secrets of successful mousses

When you make a traditional mousse, that is to say without using a siphon, whatever the recipe, it's always the same principle: on one side you have a dense mixture, very tasty, and on the other side egg whites beaten until stiff. All the difficulty of the success of a mousse, it will be to mix the...
April 3^rd 20219,4024.6

Devising a recipe

A question I'm often asked is: how do you come up with your recipes? How do you perfect them? This is something I've already mentioned on this page, but I'll take this opportunity to go into a bit more detail.
October 15^th 201217 K4.4

Cream and sauces

Have you ever wondered why making beautiful tasty sauces is so easy when you use cream? .
October 15^th 201222 K4.4

The 3 kinds of meringue

Meringue – what could be simpler? Just beaten egg whites with sugar added. This makes a fairly stiff mixture which can then be cooked in a cool oven to create those lovely, light confections. But in the world of professional patisserie, meringue comes in three different kinds. Even if the...
June 14^th 201363 K4.5

What is the difference between bakery and patisserie?

This is a question that you may well have asked yourself and which I will attempt to answer. In France the two trades of "boulangerie" (bakery) and "pâtisserie" (patisserie and confectionery) have always been quite distinct, but where exactly do the boundaries lie? .
February 7^th 2017132 K 14.1

Egg yolks and caster sugar

We often come across recipes where we need to mix egg yolks with caster sugar. This would appear to be a very ordinary and simple thing to do but, be warned, these two ingredients can behave oddly together.
February 15^th 201881 K 24.3

Is it really necessary to cream egg yolks?

Let’s try and answer a question that crops up in cookery and patisserie, even if it verges on the existential: do the egg yolks in a custard recipe really need to be beaten until pale, or not?
February 28^th 201843 K4.3

Balancing flavours

In the kitchen, we sometimes use ingredients that can be a little overwhelming in taste. Grilled lardons, for example, are very good, they give a great taste to a lot of recipes where they are added, but you have to be objective, they're still pretty fatty!
November 7^th 20208,4535

The proper use of a pastry bag

Ever used a pastry bag? Handy, isn't it, but unfortunately not very easy to fill. In fact, to be comfortable with this tool, you'd need 3 or 4 arms, which isn't very common. Does that mean it's a goner? No, of course not. Here are 2 or 3 tips to help you get comfortable with it.
December 5^th 20208,4784.7

In praise of the whetstone

Have you ever seen a butcher or a chef sharpen his knife before using it? Usually he uses a special tool, a long thin cylinder made of very hard metal. And in a smooth and elegant gesture, he very quickly passes the edge of the knife against the rifle, which makes a very characteristic noise,...
June 5^th 202111 K4.8

The return of the "Norman hole"

You maybe know the "trou normand", this old gastronomic custom typically French which consists in taking a (small) glass of calvados, generally between the last course and the dessert? It's something that seems a bit anachronistic nowadays, having a glass of an alcohol of more than 60° in the...
December 18^th 202114 K4.8

The super powers of cornstarch

I start this new year by evoking an old product, that you most probably have in your cupboards, a white powder, often in a small cardboard package with a slightly outdated look, only the "gluten free" is relatively recent, it is simply cornstarch, hence its name of maïzena. It's used for a lot...
January 14^th 202214 K

The dissociation of a preparation

It may have already happened to you: You prepare a sauce, a cream, a ganache etc. and then suddenly or almost, the whole thing dissociates, and from a smooth mixture that you were preparing with love, you end up with a horrible thing with a more or less solid part and another liquid part. It's...
January 22^th 202212 K4.9

Creams in pastry

In this post, I propose you to make a small tour of the different creams in pastry. If you like to make them at home, you have already noticed the many creams that exist for the different desserts: Chantilly, custard, diplomat, Bavarian, etc. etc. Each one more delicious than the other, they...
March 12^th 202213 K4.5

The gelling agent in a cream

If you start making a Bavarian cream for example, or any other that contains a gelling agent such as gelatin or agar-agar, you will sooner or later be confronted with the problem: How to properly incorporate this gelling agent into my cream? (and we will focus on gelatin).
June 18^th 202214 K4.9

Tranché, dissociated, failed, in short... missed!

When preparing a sauce or a cream, there's always a (small) risk that the creamy preparation you're working on will suddenly separate into two parts of different textures: a liquid part, for example, and a more or less solid part, or even become lumpy. It's terribly frustrating, but we'll see...
June 19^th 202312 K5

The 3 secrets of Parisian flan

A flan Parisien, or boulanger, is a simple yet delicious cake. A cream, a mixture of milk, eggs and sugar, is poured into a raw pastry base and baked in the oven until the pastry and cream are cooked. This is the simplest version of the recipe, probably the original one, but nowadays the cream...
July 21^th 202315 K4.7

No need to boil gelatin

Gelatin is a magical ingredient for making light, creamy, structured desserts, yet it's often misused in the kitchen. A common mistake in some recipes is the idea that it needs to be boiled for it to work properly, but this is a mistake indeed: gelatin melts at a much lower temperature, around...
November 21^th 20247,3175

Cherry clafoutis, with or without pits?

When it comes to cherry clafoutis recipes, there's often a camp of those who argue that you absolutely have to leave the stones in because it tastes better, and the other camp (myself included) who prefer cherries without stones, which makes a much more pleasant clafoutis to eat. But is it true...
June 29^th 20253,7455