CurvyMama’s got her first gig at a farmer’s market! Yippee! On May 20, I will be selling pies at DC Grey Market, which is a really cool, renegade little venue for just-getting-started vendors like me. Read about the market on their website. It was inspired by underground markets in San Francisco and elsewhere, as The Washington Post reports in one of its stories about Grey Market. If you’re nearby,

I’ve fallen in love, and fallen hard. Here is a picture of my beloved: Let me tell you about her. She is delicate and light, rich and ethereal all at once. She is, in a word, enchanting.

You can’t see CurvyMama, but she’s dancing around the kitchen in her apron, waving a happy whisk in the air. Why all this jubilation after 10 p.m. on a weekday? I made the perfect pastry cream! I have suffered through the slings and arrows of outrageously–and inexplicably–runny pastry cream. So I am savoring this victory, knowing that on another occasion I might screw it up again and lose all

Okay, I used the old journalism trick of hijacking you with the headline. I confess that it was a bit misleading. The contest wasn’t really about the lemon pie filling; It was about the crust. And I wasn’t sure you would click on a post about a pie crust smackdown. But hey, before you abandon me in annoyance, let me tell you that the filling was also really great. And I’m going to give you the recip

When Melissa wrote in about her pastry cream crisis, I felt her pain. I had just had the same experience: Hours before 25 guests were to arrive at my house for a pie social, I awoke to find that the lovely pastry cream that had set up so nicely in the refrigerator at bedtime had turned into a pourable custard. This meant that instead of enjoying nicely formed slices of honey-vanilla pie with gingersnap crust, my gues

Pastry techniques class at L’Academie de Cuisine is totally joyful, but also very humbling. I can explain best in pictures: My Bavarois cake: Chef Claude’s Bavarois cake: ‘Nuff said. Soon I will try to post more details about how we made the little meringuey shapes around the outside, and how we made the raspberry mirror glaze. (For the rest of the cake, see last week’s post on how we made the

Just about everyone has heard of mousse, but fewer know about its light and airy cousin, the Bavarian. It’s a nice thing to have in your repertoire when a heavy main course begs for a mercifully light dessert. Make no mistake: this baby is still very rich, but it lands lightly on the tongue. You can serve it by itself, in a lovely little dessert dish, as I did for a guest the other night, or you can build it in

Remember the mousse terrine and the Bavarians we made last night in pastry techniques class? I didn’t have good photos for you because the terrine was, well, not that fetching in its waiting-to-be-served state (upside down), and the Bavarians were in Tupperware containers, since they were the leftovers of a cake project that’s still at school, to be finished next week. So I thought I’d share a coupl

This is the sort of delight we experience in pastry techniques class: a bowl of chocolate mousse two feet deep. No, we didn’t get to dive in head-first. But we did get to take home a little terrine (loaf) of the mousse, topped with a rectangle of baked pâte sucrée. Mine is sitting all wrapped up snugly in plastic wrap in the fridge, waiting to be unmolded and turned upside down for a sufficiently beloved friend

We had so much fun rolling cakes in pastry class the other night. And no, we didn’t roll them along the floor like so many bowling balls, silly. We learned to make roulades, which is just a fancy way of saying we rolled them into swirly designs with fillings. One type of roulade was familiar to me: the kind that looks like a log when it’s all done, and each round slice has a neat little spiral design in i