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.

Choux pastry (pâte à choux)

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Choux pastry is used for making profiteroles, eclairs and other small pastries.

Nanterre brioche

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This is the classic, but delicious, brioche recipe that you can find in any good baker's. Her unique shape is made from small balls of dough put in a mould.

Millefeuille

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Millefeuille is one of the best pastries available, if it is well made, i.e.: 2 layers of light vanilla cream between 3 layers of fine crispy (possibly caramelized) puff pastry.

Gougères

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Gougères are small cheese choux pastries, sometimes (like here) with bits of ham.

Brioche galette

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This galette (flat cake) is made with brioche dough, stuck with little pieces of butter and sprinkled with sugar.

Pains briochés aux raisins

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This classic French "viennoiserie" is a sweet bun containing confectioner's custard (crème pâtissière) and rum-soaked raisins. It demands a bit of skill, but is not too complicated.

Mini palmiers

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Palmiers are a traditional French patisserie, consisting of folded puff pastry caramelized with sugar. These small versions are made with the shop-bought puff pastry that comes ready-rolled in a circle.

Nougatine

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Nougatine is a delicious nut toffee: caramel mixed with toasted flaked almonds. Not a dessert in itself, it is often used to decorate cakes and pastries. But those who enjoy good things are sure to want to eat it on its own!

Rich hazelnut buttercream

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This delicious preparation is an alternative to almond frangipane: a nutty buttercream enriched with eggs, designed to be cooked into various pastries.

Craquelin (sweet cracker dough)

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This sweet cracker dough ("craquelin" in French) is a very simple mixture: equal parts of flour, butter and light brown sugar. It is simlilar to a shortbread dough and can be rolled out very thinly and cut into any shape as desired. Craquelin is mostly used (though not exclusively) on top of choux pastry (pâte à choux) to give a more attractive and regular result, with eclairs, for example, and gives them a delicious crisp crust on the top. This is very much the current trend in French...

Noisette butter

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"Noisette" means hazelnut in French. Noisette butter is made by melting butter, then boiling and raising it to a high temperature until it takes on both a light brown hazelnut colour and also a characteristic nutty smell. Compared with simple clarified butter, this noisette butter has a delicate yet distinctive flavour which is a welcome addition to both savoury and sweet recipes (particularly in cakes and pastries).

Lime confectioner's custard (pastry cream)

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Taking its inspiration from lemon confectioner's custard, this version has a distinctive lime flavour. Both juice and zest are used to combine the juice's slight acidity with a hint of bitterness from the zest.

Canadian apple crumble

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The classic apple crumble is given a Canadian twist here: rolled oats in the topping and a drizzle of maple syrup over the apples. These two small changes make the flavour very distinctive and very, well... Canadian.

Breton strawberry and verbena tart

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Strawberries and verbena go well together. In this recipe they are combined as a verbena crémeux with whole fresh strawberries on a Breton sablé base.

Lemon tart

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Lemon tart (tarte au citron) is one of France's great classic desserts, though there are many different versions. This is more or less the classic version, with sweetcrust pastry and a creamy filling that uses both lemon zest and juice for a deliciously tart tart!

Sesame cookies

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These soft little cookies have a double whammy of sesame flavour from toasted seeds combined with a little sesame oil.

Lemon and grated apple tart

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You'll be amazed by the flavour of this tart, it's so distinctive and well-balanced. The apples are grated, rather than sliced, to mix well with the lemon juice and zest. The result is an exceptional tart (yes, really!).

Blackberry and almond fondant tart

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Balckberries and almonds go so well together: the slight tartness of the berries is the perfect foil for the sweeter almonds. This combination makes for a delicious tart. The sweetcrust pastry case is filled with a blackberry jelly and an almond panna cotta, presented in a bold and unusual way as a change from the usual layers.

Mini almond-morello tarts

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This very simple recipe is a good way to use up leftover sweetcrust pastry. The tiny tarts are filled with almond cream and topped with a morello cherry (French Griottines are best, if you can get them).

Flours

At the most basic level, wheat grain is put through a mill, which produces a white-ish powder flour... Well, actually it's not quite that simple. First of all we need to distinguish between the different grains that can be made into flour: wheat of course, but also rye, barley, buckwheat, etc. So we...
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Recipes

A recipe is really quite a simple thing (or should be): a list of ingredients, a method, and that's all there is to it. Unfortunately its not always the case. Sometimes you might get the impression that a recipe, found in a magazine or on a web site, has been concocted especially to make you fail:...
June 3^rd 2024208 K3.6

Information on weights and measures in the kitchen

The way ingredients are described in a recipe varies from country to country. This difference, which is quite profound, relates not only to units of measurement, but also to the way in which they are measured: weight or volume. Let's take a look.
August 22^th 2024844 K3.7

Butter doesn't make you fat, unless you eat too much of it.

Whenever I'm discussing cooking and recipes, there is one idea which comes up frequently, like this: "Oh no! But that's got butter in it" (I should add, for the sake of accuracy, that this is something I hear more frequently from women, who are almost all concerned with keeping their figure). ...
March 26^th 201247 K4.5

Different kinds of pastry and dough

When cooking in general, and particularly in baking, we can make and use many different kinds of pastry and dough. All built on the same "base": flour - a powder to which we add fat, liquid or both to produce the dough which is then cooked. .
November 6^th 2012114 K 14.0

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 2017137 K 14.2

Stand mixer tools

Whether we call it a stand mixer, food processor, or simply refer to it by brand (Kenwood, KitchenAid, etc.), this machine is a valuable tool for amateur cooks, bakers or pastry chefs like ourselves. All these machines come supplied with 3 different tools. Let’s take a look at their names and...
November 2^nd 201940 K4.5

The skin of the almonds

If you like almonds, in their dried fruit version, you must use them quite often in cooking or baking, whether powdered or whole. It is not obvious, but in fact there is 2 kinds of almonds in the market, wholesale with or without the skin. .
February 8^th 202025 K4.7

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 202217 K

Your oven in "proofer" mode

In the bakery, proofing is a crucial stage in the process of making light, plump breads and pastries. During proofing, the yeast ferments the sugars present in the dough, releasing carbon dioxide which forms bubbles. This process allows the dough to swell and aerate, guaranteeing a soft, light...
September 27^th 202414 K5

Who's making the croissants?

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 20252,890

Rising

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"Pousse" (rising) is the french term used in bakery to describe the resting time during which the dough rises, i.e. swells thanks to the action of the yeast or leaven. During rising, the yeast ferments the sugars present in the dough, producing carbon dioxide which forms bubbles and increases the...
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Filo pastry

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Filo pastry (or phyllo - fillo) is a flour-based product from Greece or Turkey. The very thin sheets are often used to wrap fillings and produce a very crisp roll or parcel.Filo pastry is used for some famous Middle Eastern sweet pastries like baklava.
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Fondant icing

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Fondant icing is a mixture of sugars and water, in the form of a white paste, fairly hard when cold, but which softens when warmed. It's used for icing the tops of cakes and pastries such as millefeuilles or eclairs. It can be used white or coloured.
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Pearl sugar

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Coarse sugar crystals are usually white and have much larger grains than caster or granulated sugar.They are used for decorating cakes and pastries, such as chouquettes, for example.
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