eat dessert first
I met Michelle Gayer’s desserts many years before I ever met her. When I was still a pastry assistant I came to work with Charlie Trotter’s Desserts, which Michelle wrote while she was the pastry chef at Trotter’s, and convinced the team to make everything out of it. Her style […]
My ideal day consists of walking around NYC, eating oysters, going to museums to see great quantities of art and then finishing with an incredible meal. This is precisely what I did with my family during our trip last month. My boys were fine until about hour 3 at the […]
There are several perks to writing a food blog, the best being the excuse to have delicious cakes, like this almond chiffon cake, in the house at all times. The only person who has an issue with this is my personal trainer, but I just remind him what job security […]
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 […]
This lemon brown sugar meringue tart is the cousin of the Lemon Meringue Pie, an all American classic. The lemon is intense, smooth and bracing, which is the perfect contrast to the pillowy brown sugar meringue that floats on top. They sit on an almond pastry crust that is tender […]
After a week in Naples, with its lawless streets and swoon-worthy pizza (see my Naples post here) we were headed to Rome for a few days of art, architecture, gelato and gladiator school. We got so much more than we bargained for and loved every second of it. The boys even tolerated our […]
I know I promised a tour of the spice market in Istanbul, but I had to show you the plum pie I made for my stepmother’s birthday first. When I returned home after a month away my refrigerator was bare, nothing but a jar of capers and a bottle of […]
While we were in Italy this summer it was squash season. Every menu we looked at had squash and their blossoms on it, fried, stuffed with many different fillings and even on pizza (which will find its way into our new pizza book). I ate them in all their various […]
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 […]
These brownies have secrets! I baked them, passed them out to my family, my neighbors and my friends to see what they thought. I didn’t say anything, just asked for their honest opinions and this is what I got… “they are so RICH,” “beyond decadent,” “Amazing,” “Great, can I have […]
This past weekend I NEEDED summer. The weather was vacillating between rain and sleet, my boys couldn’t even go ice skating because the rink was just a pool of slush. The Midwestern sky, that I can usually count on for an endless blue sunny backdrop to winter, was gray. It […]
What an exciting year 2009 was. Towards the end it got a little too exciting and I was forced to take a break from posting. Now that the schedule of promoting Healthy Bread in Five has slowed down and the fevered pitch of the holidays has subsided I can get […]
I'm Zoë François and I love to bake. This is where I play with sugar and take the mystery out of baking everything from cookies to wedding cakes. More...
