Making the world a little sweeter one pastry tip at at time.
I’m a dulce de leche nut. The first time I had tried it was when a bride requested it as a filling for a her wedding cake many years ago. It was before there were dulce de leche Girl Scout cookies were invented and dulce de leche ice …
Lemon Tart – Renee Shelton Fruit curd is a common condiment on the breakfast table and is delicious over toast or waffles for breakfast. Fruit curd is also used in prebaked tart and pie shells for an easy dessert. Typically, a fruit or citrus curd is …
Chess Pie Chess Pie is a classic Southern dessert custard pie made with eggs, sugar, butter, vanilla, with some recipes containing either/both cornmeal and vinegar. Open up a dozen different community cookbooks and you’ll find that many different versions of Chess Pie, or more. The origin of …
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 …
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 …
Opéra Cake – courtesy Flickr User arnold | inuakithrough a Creative Commons License. To me, there is nothing more close-your-eyes decadent than an Opéra Cake, probably because I know what goes into it. It is sinfully rich and since it is typically served in small portions, the whole …
Traditional Galette des Rois – photo courtesy Flickr User Gael Chardon through a Creative Commons License. Twelfth Night is a celebration that marks the coming of Epiphany, and most Christians celebrate it on the 12th day after Christmas. Epiphany celebrates the divination of Christ, and …
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 …
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. …
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 …
The new Pastry Sampler tip catalog is now up on MagCloud. It contains all the major pastry tip groupings for easy reference. Enjoy! Pastry Sampler By Renee Shelton in Pastry Sampler Reference Guides & Catalogs 36 pages, published 6/6/2012 The Pastry Sampler Pastry Tip …
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. …
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 …
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 …