The Tomato Knife

Most baked goods (like cookies) taste best right out of the oven. Carrot cake, however, always seems to get better over a few days. I wanted to try my hands at making a healthy cake (or is it more of a bread?) that I could eat either for breakfast or as a mid-day energy snack. [...]

Before I get to the chocolate cake part, let me talk about the BEST MACARONS IN PARIS. Promise you they’re linked… Last year for my sister’s 25th birthday, my mom and I trekked all over the city collecting macarons. The first part of our goal was to surprise the birthday girl with 25 (yes, an [...]

Lemon bars are one of my very favorite desserts – they always have been. When I was a teenager, my mom, sister, brother, and I would trek down to Albuquerque for violin lessons – that’s an hour from Santa Fe (where we lived) and thus shows pure dedication. Now that I’m thinking about it, though, [...]

We haven’t broken into the “gâteau des rois” yet, but I’m feeling lucky today and think I just might be the one to get the piece with the “fève” hidden in it. It’s a French tradition to celebrate Epiphany (today) with a special cake that has a surprise tucked inside (usually a miniature porcelain figurine). [...]

A quatre-quart is a simple cake traditionally made with four different ingredients (eggs, sugar, flour and butter) in equal parts. Thus the name, “four-quarters”. One thing I’ve learned about French cooking is that you have to have a scale. Unlike American recipes, European ones give ingredients in weight (i.e. grams for butter or kilos for [...]

It took me quite some time to find where to buy frozen berries in France. When I first arrived as a junior in college, I was an avid smoothie drinker – concocting one pretty much every day or so. Since I had other priorities that first year, I kind of let smoothie-drinking go by the [...]