Patrick S

I haven't tried a great variety of CC recipes, and Ruth is totally right about people having different preferences with this cake. But having said that, my go-to recipe is Cook's Illustrated's "Simple Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting." You can make it in the food processor too, which is handy - use it to shred the carrots, wipe it out, swap blades, and then use it to make the batter. I love the frosting recipe as well. The addition of a small amount of sour cream makes the frosting perfect, IMHO. I usually add the zest of 1 orange to the batter as well. http://www.food.com/recipe/simple-carrot-cake-with-cream-cheese-frosting-cooks-illustrated-487192

Made a variation of Pierre Herme's Tart Infiniment Vanille. This is basically faithful to Herme's recipe, except: 1) I did not include a variety of vanilla beans, just Madagascar beans, 2) I molded the top in hemisphere molds instead of in tart rings, 3) I used a gelatin-thickened vanilla mirror glaze rather than Herme's NH pectin-thickened glaze, and 4) I used a little more white chocolate in the ganache to compensate for the fact that I was using a chocolate with a lower percentage of cocoa butter (otherwise the ganache would have been too thin). From bottom to top are: pate sucre shell, ladyfinger cake brushed with vanilla syrup, vanilla bean infused white chocolate ganache, dome of mascarpone and creme anglaise, vanilla glacage mirroir. Next, I want to try the Infiniment Cafe tart.

Yes! Except I substituted more chocolate in place of the walnuts. I posted this same photo on my Instagram, and a couple of days later Payard's NYC Bakery reposted the photo (with attribution). I was honored!

I had more apples to use up, so I tried another variation on tart tatin, this time using Christophe Michalak's recipe. Sablé base. Added a little clear glaze for some sparkle.

And as I understand "sucre le bec" in this context, it means something along the lines of "sweet tooth," i.e. never has there been so many ways to sweeten the tooth.

FYI - for any of you that use Google Chrome, you can add the Google Translate extension to your browser. The extension automatically offers to translate each page, and does so quickly with the click of a single button, right there in the browser window, preserving the formatting and eliminating the need to copy and paste anything into a new window or tab. Obviously there are a lot of expressions that don't translate perfectly, but I have found in virtually every case so far that the French-to-English translation is more than adequate to make the recipe. Additionally, once the page is translated, you can hover over any bit of translated text to see the source language text, which is useful if you're trying to decipher a particular bit of difficult text. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/translate Firefox has the same extension available as well: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/google-translator-for-firefox/?src=ss

Needed something quick and easy when friends stopped by, so I made these simple chocolate cookies, adapted from recipe by Francois Payard.

Honestly, it's not different from any other tart tatin I've tried, except for maybe a little more eye appeal. ETA: I have not tried the quince version- in fact, I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never baked with quince before at all!

Tart Tatin, recipe from Phillipe Conticini. Thin-sliced apples cooked with caramel, atop caramelized puff pastry, garnished with hazelnut streusel.

For Christmas dessert, made a gingerbread cake with orange zest, with cookie butter Swiss meringue buttercream and some salted caramel glaze.

I'm sure that's going to be true in most cases, in terms of total lifetime energy inputs, though obviously this will depend on the total lifetime number of reuses of the metal baking tin. Considering energy inputs alone, manufacture of reusable materials like metal and glass will generally require much greater energy input than for disposable materials. Aluminum manufactured from ore might require something like 200-300 MJ per kilo to produce, compared to something like 25-50MJ per kilo to produce paper from standing timber (energy to produce from recycled products will be lower of course). And of course reusable products will require additional energy (and other) inputs for cleaning during their lifecycle (e.g. dishwashing), whereas disposable products will not. One could imagine a simple but probably not rare case (as andiesenji refers to) in which, for instance, a consumer purchases a metal loaf pan but only uses it a few times before eventually discarding many years later. In a case like that, in which total number of reuses is very low, use of disposable materials would require less energy inputs overall. But this is more of an outlier, boundary case. When you're looking at a situation in which the metal product is reused many times during its lifetime, I'm sure it's true that the total energy inputs will be lower than for disposable equivalents.

Thank you, Jim! There's always room for one more. I sample everything I make, several times, but try to resist the urge to go crazy with portions. Occasionally I fail epically, and eat 3 kouign amann, or something like that, right in a row. I go to the gym about 4 nights a week, which helps balance it out. If I didn't do that, I'd probably have some big trouble.

Dacqouise baked in a frame, covered with feuilletine, Caramelia ganache, and a modified version of Herme's deep chocolate cream.

My daughter wanted to work with me in the kitchen, and wanted something cheesecakey, so we made some simple blondies with cheesecake layering, and threw in some Caramelia chocolate as well. I used the leftover Sable for a crust.

I actually did both. Cut it with a circle cutter and then baked in the rings!

Thank you, John! The bases are just over 3" in diameter, and about 0.3" thick. I baked them in small tart rings.

Cuban pork, lechon asado, one of our staple foods, with garlic sauce and pickled red onion on Bolillo rolls.

Vanilla cream hemispheres infused with Madagascan and Tahitian beans, glazed with a salted caramel glaze, on a sable breton base. My daughter helped me in the kitchen this week, and we had a great time making these. I hope all of you are having a lovely weekend!

Chicken quarters dry-rubbed, started over Apple wood smoke, finished over direct heat on the grill and sauced. Served with grilled Mexican street corn - mayo/sour cream base with lime, garlic, cilantro and cojita cheese.

Made kouign amann again, again in the form of "kouignettes," in the style of Georges Larnicol. These are flavored with finely ground freeze-dried raspberry and strawberry. I used this instead of fresh fruit because I feared that adding too much water would interfere with the sugar caramelization. The powdered fruit worked great.

I had a bunch of egg whites I needed to use up, so I made several almond dacquoise. This one was filled with vanilla pastry cream, and served with warm strawberry sauce.

Blueberries and cream cookies from Momofuku Milk Bar recipe, and a variation using dried peach rather than blueberry.

Certainly. I used chef Eddy Van Damme's recipe, which incorporates Greek yogurt along with cream cheese. Sounds a little crazy, but it's awesome, and yields a fantastic texture. The recipe is at: http://www.chefeddy.com/2013/03/creamy-cheesecake/ i I baked in rectangular frames, over vanilla wafer crust, in a water bath, to an internal temperature of 150f, then turned off the heat, opened the door, and let cool slowly in the oven for about an hour before removing.

If you're looking to work more air into a baked custard, my first thought would be to fold in some Italian meringue before baking. I've never tried this so I have no idea how well it would work. If you come up with something that works well for you, let me know.

For the July 4th party, made cheesecake. Served some with strawberry Grand Marnier sauce, and some with chocolate creme anglaise and diced vanilla marshmallow.