DORIE GREENSPAN

Michael Laiskonis: Ace Pastry Chef/New Blogger

Yesterday, my friend Michael Laiskonis, the extraordinarily talented pastry chef of Le Bernardin restaurant in New York, wrote to tell me that he's launched his blog.  It's exciting to have a new neighbor in cyberspace, especially one who is so smart and has so much to tell us and to teach us.

For his first post, Michael muses on "The Egg" and gives a recipe - pictured above - for an eggshell filled with milk chocolate creme brulee, caramel sauce and caramel foam and topped with a drizzle of maple syrup and a few flakes of Maldon sea salt.  It's a showstopping restaurant dessert that can be accomplished chez you with patience and two pieces of fancy, fun equipment - an egg-topper and a whipped cream siphon.  I think  it could also be made in teensy espresso cups (and I hope Michael doesn't mind my suggesting this for us homebakers).

Whether you make the egg or not, you'll find interesting thoughts about eggs, the recipe's roots (as soon as I saw it and the words "maple syrup," I thought of Alain Passard in Paris and, indeed, Michael acknowledges Passard as a source of inspiration here) and Michael's way of working.

I'm really happy to have another friend in the ether - I think you'll be, too.

Baking with Dorie: Daniel Boulud's Coffee-Cardamom Pots de Creme

Leave it to Daniel Boulud, one of the country's most exciting chefs, to come up with a fresh take on classic pots de creme - baked custard to many of us. 

Here, in a recipe from the Cafe Boulud Cookbook, Daniel caramelizes coffee beans and cardamom pods to intensify their flavor, then he uses them to infuse the custard's milk.    The inspiration was Middle Eastern coffee; the result is an exotic reading of what is essentially a comfort-food favorite.

The recipe is this week's Baking with Dorie column at Serious Eats.  (And the photograph, taken from the book, is the work of Gentl & Hyers, the same photographers who did the pictures for Baking with Julia.)

A note to those of you who jump to the recipe and don't read the intro (I know you're out there): if you don't want to cover the pan with plastic wrap, that's okay - you can use aluminum foil.

Baking with Dorie: EVO and Yogurt Cake

I'm always so excited when I can pass along a recipe like this one:  It's easy to make; quick to put together; requires no special equipment; uses ingredients we're likely to have on hand; bakes up perfectly every time; and tastes sooooooo good.

I mean, what more could you possibly ask of one little cake?

The evo in the recipe's title is extra-virgin olive oil, and it's what gives the cake its rich flavor and moist texture.  The other star ingredient is yogurt, plain, unflavored and wonderfully tangy.

In this version of the recipe (it's based on a recipe using flavorless oil and lemon that is a French staple), I'm using lime, but you can use anything citrusy that you have on hand.  You can also soak the cake in a citrus and/or rum syrup or glaze it with marmalade or jam.  Or you can just leave it as it -- since as is is great.

You can find the recipe in this week's Baking with Dorie column at Serious Eats.  I hope you'll make it.  And I bet, if you do, you'll make it again and again and again.  I do.

Baking with Dorie: Galette des Rois

It's that time of year again:  Time for Epiphany and Kings' Cakes, galettes des rois!  Last year's best galette des rois was the one above, an Ispahan galette filled with rose-almond cream and raspberries, and it was brought to us by my patissier prefere, its creator, Pierre Herme (above).

Epiphany is officially January 6, but the pastry shops here in Paris are filled with galettes - have been since January 2; will be for a couple of weeks more.  And to celebrate this delicious pastry and its customs (when you click through you'll read all about finding the trinket and winning the crown), the galette des rois is this week's Baking with Dorie recipe on Serious Eats. 

Of course I hope you'll make it and love it, but I also hope you'll be the one to find the trinket tucked inside the cake!

These trinkets - or feves, as they're called - were collected from previous galettes.  I just might cheat a bit and recycle one of them into my own Kings Cake this Sunday.

Baking with Dorie: Pierre Herme's Fruit and Spice Loaf

This week's Baking with Dorie recipe on Serious Eats is one that's perfect for the holidays:  a type of pain d'epices, or honey cake, from Parisian pastry wizard Pierre Herme.  While it's not at all like my chocolate-gingerbread (last week's recipe),  there's something about the loaf that makes me think it's my American gingerbread's long-lost French cousin. 

Pain d'epices is a holiday must in France and Pierre's, not surprisingly, is terrific.  If you make it -- and I hope you will -- try to make it the day before you want to serve it:  The flavors really come into their own after a day's rest under wraps.

TYPO ALERT:  While it may be changed by now, there was a typo in the original recipe.  The correct amount for the water, the first ingredient is:  3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons water.  I'm very sorry.

Baking with Dorie: Chocolate-Gingerbread Cake for Christmas

Since it 's minutes before Christmas, my Baking with Dorie recipe on Serious Eats is for a holiday classic:  gingerbread.  My version is made as a tall square cake that can be cut in cubes and it's got melted chocolate as well as chopped chocolate and fresh ginger inside it, and there's a delicious chocolate glaze on top of it.  Not really classic, but really, really good. 

It's also easy to make and - ta-da:  freezable.  If you wanted to, you could make the cake now, ice it and freeze it until you're ready for it.  You'd have one less thing to do when the going gets going on Monday and Tuesday.

This recipe comes from Baking From My Home to Yours.  And the beautiful photograph (don't you want to be wherever that cake is?) was taken by Alan Richardson.

All Things Considered Considers Christmas Pudding

If you're over the age of 5, you've probably sung about figgy pudding - or will be singing about it next week.  But have you ever tasted it?  Or, better yet, made it?

If you've always wondered about the dessert - sometimes called Plum Pudding or Christmas Pudding - you're not alone.  A little while ago, Michele Norris, host of NPR's All Things Considered, called me because she, too, was having a figgy pudding wonder moment.  Which explains how I ended up in her terrific kitchen in Washington, DC making the above. 

I know it looks like a fruity Bundt cake (it was baked in a Kugelhopf pan), but it's really a very boozy steamed pudding.  It's got tons of fruit - figs, of course, and raisins, cherries and cranberries, too - and a significant amount of rum and brandy. (You'll have to card your guests before you serve them even a forkful.)

If you're as intrigued as Michele and I were with the pudding, just click here.  There's more information about the dessert and my recipe, of course.  And you can email the whole kit-and-caboodle to yourself or your favorite puddin' head.  You can also listen to the broadcast and hear how much fun we had making - and eating - this hearty sweet.

Great Cookies for a Cookie Swap - or for Santa

If I've got my calendar straight, this week should be crazy busy with shopping, holiday parties and cookie exchanges.  Cookie exchanges, for those of you who've never been to one, are a wonderful American invention in which every guest is asked to bring large quantities of his or her favorite cookie, so that the delicious cookies can be exchanged for everyone else's delicious cookies.  If all goes right, at the end of a good cookie swap you go home with a fabulous variety of oodles of great cookies. 

I recently created four cookie-swappable recipes for AARP The Magazine - including Almond and Currant Tea Cakes, Coffee-Hazelnut Biscotti, Sweet and Savory Roll-ups (think savory rugelach) and the pictured Cherry and Spice Brownie Bites - and, just for good measure, I added the recipe for my all-time favorite World Peace Cookies.  I also included some tips for hosting an exchange.

If you jump on this idea now, you might be saved when Santa comes down the chimney looking for his milk and cookies.

This photo was taken by Jim Franco.

Baking with Dorie: Fluff-Filled Chocolate Madeleines

Bonjour from Paris!  Michael and I just flew in this morning.

This week's Baking with Dorie recipe on Serious Eats is for Fluff-Filled Chocolate Madeleines, fun, delicious little cakes, which, as you'll read, I won't be serving to my Parisian neighbors.

If filling a national treasure with marshmallow fluff sounds a little too goofy to you,  skip the fluff - the chocolate madeleines are great all by their ownsomes.  But I urge you to go for the ganache dip.  What doesn't taste better wtih ganache?

Roll-Out Cookies for the Holidays

If you didn't see my recipes for roll-out cookies in the December issue of Bon Appetit, you can now find them on Epicurious. 

There are recipes for chocolate, spice and vanilla roll-out cookies, along with a recipe for an easy to scroll, squiggle and curlicue royal icing that dries hard.

I love these cookies - especially the spice cookies, which are gingersnappy and get a little extra zip from dried mustard - for lots of reasons: they are super easy to roll out; they keep their shape when they're baked, so you can cut them in fanciful forms and use them for decorations (if you want to use them as ornaments, make a hole in the cookies before you bake them); and, they're really, really delicious.

I hope you enjoy them!