Three chocolate covered pastries on a plate.

Profiteroles

12/27/2023

Profiteroles, small choux puffs filled with vanilla ice cream and draped with a bittersweet chocolate sauce, are a fabulous dessert to have in your repertoire. They are equally wonderful for a large dinner soiree as they are for an intimate dinner for two. The puffs, crafted from the same P¢te…

A stack of doughnuts on top of a counter.

Croquembouche

12/19/2023

Croquembouche is one of the many classic French pastry dishes attributed to Antonin CarÃªme, known as the â€œking of chefs and the chef to kings.â€ He served as chef to French, Russian, and English royalty and aristocracy in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. A recipe for this unique pastry…

A trifle with raspberries and whipped cream.

Raspberry Orange Trifle

12/13/2023

Trifle can be traced back to mid-nineteenth-century England as a dessert consisting of biscuits soaked in wine, layered with custard, and topped with whipped syllabubâ€“a sweet cream with added acid. Today there are countless versions of Trifle, many incorporating fresh berries for color and taste. In the place of the…

Gâteau Favorite

12/05/2023

This wonderful g¢teau is an example of how the addition of a single element to a classic cake elevates it to another level. In this case we add a layer of flourless Chocolate Souffl© Sheet to our Dacquoise, serving two purposes. One, it provides additional complexity, with the soft and…

Donuts with chocolate and white icing on a plate.

Black and White Cookies

11/29/2023

For those who grew up with the occasional bakery treat of a Black and White Cookie, this recipe should bring a smile to your face. There is something about this cake-like cookie, with the sweet vanilla and chocolate icing, that is simply fun to eat. In my version below, the…

Apple Cranberry Sour Cream Pie

11/16/2023

Center City Philadelphia of the 1980’s had a wealth of very good restaurants. For classic French cuisine, there was Le Bec Fin and La PanetiÃ¨re. In Season and Friday Saturday Sunday (still in existence) featured innovative American menus. The Garden in a beautiful townhouse on Spruce, offered country French cooking…

Cranberry Orange Cake

11/08/2023

Martha’s Vineyard in the fall has its own unique beauty and seasonal rhythm. The crowds thin out, up-island beaches no longer require permits and driving to down-island towns no longer demands careful time planning. In the 1980s at Morning Glory Farm in Edgartown, there was a pot of clove-laden apple…

A three tier chocolate cheesecake on a white plate.

Triple Chocolate Mousse

11/01/2023

This elegant and chic dessert, is perfect for a small dinner soir©e. It features a trio of chocolate mousses – dark chocolate, mocha (milk chocolate), and a white chocolate mousse which interplay harmoniously with each other. Surprisingly for a mousse dessert it slices beautifully, allowing for thin slices to be…