Making the world a little sweeter one pastry tip at at time.
Xanthan gum is used as a binding agent in doughs and acts as a stablizer, and is perfect for creating gluten-free flours. On Pastry Sampler, I’ve shared a couple of different recipes to try for gluten-free flour mixes a basic recipe based on rice flour …read more
I do lots of reading for all my pastry writing and I recently found a little gem, Foods and Food Adulterants on Baking Powders, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It goes into detail on the “investigation into the character and composition of baking powders.” …read more
Yes, there is more than one way to mix a cake, and depending on the recipe and the resulting cake, it could be firm and dense, light and airy, or coarse and crumbly. Choosing the right recipe will enable you to choose the right cake for …read more
I get this question a lot, so I figured it would fit with the June theme for this blog – What is a dariole mold? A dariole mold is a small, round mold, and can be found by different retailers by the name of ‘aspic mold’ or ‘baba mold’. These …read more
Ice cream. Sweet, cold, and delicious. And not a modern invention, even though the use of an ice cream maker and freezer make the job of making it and storage of the treat easy. I wrote about the differences between Italian, French, Philadelphia, and New York style …read more
I’m a big fan of Indian food. I love the spicy sauces and rich vegetarian entrees. And having ordering from the dessert menu of many different Indian restaurants, I’m not sure which I enjoy more – eating them or seeing the paper-thin sheets of silver decorate them. …read more
Cannolis – they inspire both hunger and fear: hunger as they are crispy tubes filled with a sweetened cream filling, and fear as they have to be made and fried just right or else you’ll end up with a hard, greasy shell. Cannolis are one of those …read more
The St. Honoré tip is by far the most requested of the specialty pastry tips I carry. It looks like a large plain tip with a v cut in the front. And if you have ever had this dessert, you would understand its elegant appeal. …read more
I was going to talk about a Tres Leches cake but thought about the Trois Frères cake, too. Completely different cakes, but both revolve around the number three. So, I decided to talk about both. Tres Leches Cake As the name suggests, this Mexican dessert is …read more
A friend asked me recently if couverture and chocolate were interchangeable terms. They are not (chocolate is a general term; couverture is premium chocolate with a specific amount of cocoa butter inside) but this made me think of other pastry terms that were vague or …read more