French desserts

N.B. : Click on the text, not on the photos.

Bonjour !

Here is a compil’ of my French style desserts, with a little blah-blah in the middle.

Les crêpes !
Crêpes Suzette mandarine – Crêpes boisettes (berry) – Crêpes little sun – Crêpes soufflées tropicales

More : crêpes compilation (sweet and savory)

Noël et Rois (Xmas and Kings) :
Pompe à l’huile (sweet fougasse) – Nonnettes (fluffy gingerbread) – Flocon de neige (snowflake cake) – Nougat glacé (honey ice-cream) – Galette des Rois (Kings’ cake) – Galette des Rois au chocolat

More : Christmas dessert compilation

Les fruits !
Poire pochée au chocolat – Baked pineapple – Fruity papillote – Tartelette aux figues – Pomme lampion (baked apple) – Crémet aux fruits rouges

Classiques :
Génoise – Cygne et choux (cream puffs and swan) – Millefeuille –Tarte au chocolat – Religieuse (cream puff “nun”)

Regions :
Brioche de Pâques (Easter bread, Provence) – Gâteau de Metz (retro chocolate cake, Lorraine) – Croustade or Pastis aux pommes (apple pie, Gascogne) – Millas (corn and pumpkin, South-West) –Farz fourn (butter cake, Bretagne)

Festifs :
Pets de nonne (‘farting nun’ carnival donuts) – Mango coco millefeuille – Star anise mandarin chocolate tarte – Crémet in mint sauce – Gâteau de la bergère (Shepherd’s cake made with potato) – Petits flans a la betterave (sweet beetroot puddings)

Recipe or not ?

Many posts don’t have recipes, particularly for desserts. Because I am extremely secretive ? Not, really. Surely I am too lazy to write recipes for each post (it’s everyday). Whenever you see an “unexplained” dish and you want a recipe or even more details, ask me in comments. I’ll answer.
That’s not my blogging style to make a recipe book. Many do it. I could copy and paste, to make it look serious. That would be cheating. Most times, I don’t follow recipes, or loosely.

You often read that you can cook without a scale and a precise recipe, but for baking cakes, you need precise scales and measuring instruments. Nothing is more wrong. It is true that the professional baker, in his “laboratoire”, works very precisely. The every-day job is to reproduce many times the same recipe that has been tested in that shop’s conditions, with exactly the same quality of ingredients, with lots of equipment, in an air-conditioned place.
In your kitchen, you change of brand of flour, your fruits are more juicy today, your eggs are bigger, it’s hot, you whisk slower than an electric batter, butter melts… Follow strictly the recipe, and you end up with a batter that is too liquid, and you get a mess. Living in another country, I have never been further from the ideal condition of the recipe book recipes. Japanese eggs, flour, butter, sugar, baking powders -just to name the most common ingredient- are not like those in France. The oven is different. Oh yeah ! And that’s neither a good nor a bad thing.
So, at home, it’s easier to memorize the texture the dough should have, the color of a cake, the taste of fruit sauce… That’s how I started baking with my grand-mothers when I was too short to reach the kitchen table so I had to stand on a chair.

Where are the flashy macarons ? the mountains of cream ?

They can stay in the shops. I like them less and less. I really prefer simple desserts, regional specialties, forgotten grand-ma recipes. (well I have added a few macarons, a request…)
I want to eat healthy, without obsession, but without excess either. I am not interested by the 1000 calories per serving cakes you can see these days. For my taste, it’s too sweet, too fat, and the flavors are covered by that excess. So the quantity of sugar I add is exactly what is needed for the good taste. For a fruit dessert, I often don’t add any sweetener. And the size of the desserts is smaller and also based on item (for instance, I’ll use 1 egg or 1 apple…and evaluate the quantities of other ingredients to match it).