Lee Gomes

A Pierre Herme vanilla tart recipe calls for seven gold gelatin leaves. How many teaspoons of Knox is that? (I've searched the eGullet threads on this topic, but found the formulas therein to be bloomin' impossible to follow.) FWIW, this is the recipe. http://kitchenmusings.com/2009/07/pierre-hermes-vanilla-tart.html

It does indeed. Thanks very much, Theabroma. Lee

So are "pate a bomb" and "appareil a bombe" the same thing? That would be nice, as there are recipes for the former all over the place. Thanks for the info, racheld; the recipe I am using is from the most recent Larousse des Desserts; I presume the Italian ingredient would be the pistachio ice cream that forms the outer layer of the bombe. The appareil/pate is for the inner core. Merci!

I am making a Bombe Doria, which has pistachio ice cream on the outside and a core of "appareil a bombe" on the inside. I can't, though, find an English-language recipe for the latter. (The ones in French I have seem inconsistent or contradictory, though that surely has more to do with my French language skills than anything else.) If anyone can point to an English recipe, or provide the outline of one, I would be very grateful. I know enough to know that an "appareil a bombe" is ultimately a pretty simple matter of syrup and egg yolks and perhaps some whipped cream.

What does (SQ) mean in a list of recipe ingredients? I am looking at the big Alain Ducasse dessert cookbook, and while for most of the items, a weight or amount is listed, there will occasionally be the note (SQ). For example, in a recipe for Szechwan Pepper Creme Brulee, there are the quantities for milk, cream, egg yolks, etc. But the last item is "Szechwan Pepper (SQ)." If I had to guess, it would be "to taste," but I was wondering if someone actually knew. Thanks.

Great suggestions; thanks all.

I am planning on baking a French-style cake that uses Earl Grey tea as a major flavor component. The cake is a typical French entrement, with two layers of light chocolate cake brushed with an Earl Grey-syrup mixture, a layer comprised of an Earl Grey tea mousse, and finally two regular chocolate mousse layers that have no tea at all. I am looking for an Earl Grey that is bright, with a lot of the orange flavors that make it Earl Grey in the first place. Any suggestions on a brand to use? The cake, btw, is from Pierre Herme, the famous Paris pastry chef.

Sorry for the dumb mistakes == in the ingredients, it's indeed just 50 g of the emulsifier, and 1,500 grams (one thousand five hundred) of whole eggs; and the oven temperature is indeed 355F. I promise to copy edit my next post much better. Thanks to all for the tips on vendors, as well as books.

On the theory that a baker's reach should exceed his grasp, I just bought La Patisserie de Pierre Herme, which, sure enough, is in many areas beyond my quite modest abilities. I'm determined to press on, though, and decided to start with his basic genoise recipe. PH's note says the cake "is easier to make and has a more interesting taste" than the classic Genoise. It's obviously scaled to five or six cakes: 600 g almond paste 500 g caster sugar 330 g egg yolks 1,500 g emulsifier Peco 50 1 kg bread flour 350 g lukewarm melted butter The recipe says to cream the almond paste and sugar, then add the yolks one by one, then the whole eggs. Replace the paddle in the mixer with the whisk, and then beat for 15 minutes. Fold in the flour and butter as normal, and bake at 180 C or 255 F. I made the cake with a quarter of the listed ingredients, and it came out fine, in a bland Genoise sort of way; it's not the sort of thing you'd want to eat by itself, but it would be splendid in a bigger construction. While it hardly rose, it wasn't at all heavy, and it had a nice gentle dome on top. I had a couple of questions, though. 1) I read elsewhere that I could just skip the Peco 50, so I did. I am curious about what it is supposed to do in the cake, and whether there is any sort of easily-available substitute. (Peco 50 seems to hail from France.) 2) The instructions say nothing about heating the eggs before beating them, so I didn't. Had I done so, would it have made a difference in how high the cake rose? 3) In a related vein, in Desserts by Pierre Herme, DG says to heat the eggs to between 130 and 140 F; that is considerably warmer than other recipes, which seem to average around 100 or 110 F. Any insights on who is right? Or do they all work equally well? 4) As I had been warned on this site, the book makes frequent use of ingredients not recognized by an American home baker -- syrups at various Baume degrees, invert sugar, sorbitol, HF, NH pectine, etc etc. Does anyone know of a link here on eGullet, or else an external site, that deals with many of these in one place? The alternative is lots of Googling, which I am happy to do but would rather be spared the need to if I could. Merci mes amis.