eat dessert first
I love this banana pudding recipe featuring homemade Nilla wafers, pastry cream (pudding), and perfect whipped cream. It’s a simple, elegant dish that you can serve in a large glass container or in individual jars. The quintessential southern dessert is found on the back of the box of Nilla wafers. […]
A Christmas Croquembouche seems like the perfect way to celebrate this holiday season. Cream puffs held together by swirls of delicate caramel make for a gorgeous, festive display. More Holiday Recipes
This is a wonderful tart filled with vanilla custard. You’ll find custard tart in every patisserie in Paris, but have likely never come across one here in the states. Its rustic simplicity is exactly the kind of pastry I love. It’s really quite easy to create; a tart dough (this […]
I first posted this Coconut Cream Cake recipe 6 years ago and have made it several times since. It is always a crowd pleaser, partly because of the meringue topping, all done up like curls that remind me of Phyllis Diller and because it is just delicious. Decadent pastry cream full […]
“Lightning!” That’s the literal translation from French I got when I put éclair into google translate. I’ve read a couple of explanations for this name, but only one makes any sense to me. “They disappear in a flash, quicker than a bolt of lightning.” This is the absolute truth. Eclairs […]
Over the holiday break I traveled with my family to Brooklyn to visit my mother. A little respite from the winter wonderland of Minneapolis. I packed all my on-the-town shoes, in varying degrees of heels for walking through museums, dining out and seeing shows. My husband checked and rechecked the […]
The chocolate berry trifle acts as the perfect vehicle for cleaning out your refrigerator/freezer of all those tasty little treats you just had to hang on to. I am guilty of an overstuffed freezer. It must be my pastry chef days of NO waste, ever. It is something I am […]
This week was my husband’s birthday and he requested a true American classic for his cake, Boston cream pie. Light pillowy sponge cake with layers of rich vanilla pastry cream and topped with a smooth chocolate glaze. Why do we call this cake a pie? It was invented in the […]
It is my birthday and I decided to make myself something fun to celebrate. Now that I am squarely in my 40s I find it especially important to make this occasion a special one. I was in the mood to play with sugar. It has been years, many years, since […]