From Paris Sweets: Sablés Korova

If chocolate is your drug of choice, try a Korova Cookie.

As I mixed the dough for these intensely chocolate Korova cookies, I could not help but think about other uses for the recipe. Pie dough, for one, the most obvious choice. The proportion of ingredients is essentially that for pâte sablée, the cookie-like crust used in many French pastries.

Yes, this recipe would make a fine tart crust to hold a multitude of sweet fillings. It is just as (or more) intensely chocolate as crusts made from chocolate sandwich cookies, but not quite as sweet.

As a cookie, it is awfully good. Slightly sandy as a shortbread like sablé should be — but with contrasting bits of bittersweet chocolate and the occasional hit of salt crystals from the fleur de sel. I’m not a raw cookie dough fan (cake batter is my weakness), but I really liked the pure chocolate flavor of this dough.

From Paris Sweets: Toast-Point Apple Tart, Tarte aux Pommes au Pain de Mie

Toast-Point Apple Tart adapted from Lenôtre via Paris Sweets

Sometimes we play the warm spice theme a little too often with apple desserts. I’m certainly guilty of adding cinnamon and its friends with nary a second thought.

It’s as if we forget that apples are worthy enough to stand on their own.

And that’s why a nonspicy take on apples can be a welcome change.

Consider this Toast-Point Apple Tart from Lenôtre, which appears in Dorie Greenspan’s Paris Sweets.
Sliced apples are baked in a caramel cream. It’s appley, but not apple-ginger-nutmeg-cinnamoney.

And it’s sweet and custardy, a bit like apple pie and ice cream flavors.

Raisins and walnuts are strewn about, just in case there wasn’t enough textural interest going on.

From Paris Sweets: Fresh Strawberry Tart with Marshmallows

Strawberry Tart with Marshmallows adapted from Paris Sweets by Dorie Greenspan

Supply, time and refrigerator capacity challenge the seasonal cook, especially if she is tries to rely on locally grown produce.

Strawberry season was too short, but I always say that.

I was in a quandary this year about what to do with the berries. I knew that if I didn’t make jam I would regret it come, oh, January when the nights are long and the daylight is puny and cold. But to make even three jars of jam the old-fashioned way requires a good two pounds of berries.

That cut into a supply already diminished by the “car-loss factor” which occurs when the driver eats the warm and juicy berries as she drives home from the market.

Timing is especially critical for fresh-berry desserts and it’s tough to decide what to make.

I was on track to make this fresh strawberry tart with marshmallows in June. Instead, I chose another French dessert, one that has been stalking me since I had it at Lenôtre on a sunny Parisian day.

I had to get it out of my head and onto a plate.

From Paris Sweets: Croq-Télé, TV Snacks for the World Cup

Croq-Télé, TV Snacks for the World Cup

The World Cup is highly anticipated in our household, and we could not be happier that the U. S. Women’s National Team has made it to the final. Their beautiful athleticism and big-hearted play are exciting to watch.

I’m so proud they are representing my country.

For the game on Sunday, I will serve these Croq-Télé — TV Snacks — from Dorie Greenspan’s Paris Sweets. They are salty-sweet, crunchy little things adapted from a recipe by pâtissier Arnaud Larher.

I hoped to make them Wednesday in honor of the USA-France semi-final but didn’t have time. We watched the game without snacks, unless you consider that I bit my nails during the second half, fearing a victory by the formidable French who played with great style and creativity.

It bears mentioning that France’s women played with kilos more class than that nation’s men’s team did in World Cup 2010.

From Paris Sweet: Punitions

Butter cookies based on a recipe from Boulangerie Poilâne via Paris Sweets

These are elegant cookies.

But they are not expensive cookies. Indeed, they are comprised of kitchen basics: butter, sugar, flour and eggs.

Their elegance is the simplicity of ingredients, the lack of unnecessary adornments, that combine to highly satisfying affect. Cookies that are enjoyed for themselves, not for extras thrown in or an icing on top.

From Paris Sweets: Meringues Chantilly

Meringues Chantilly

Cloud-like meringues stacked in pâtisserie windows have never failed to enchant me, and they are all the more beguiling in flavored tints of strawberry or pistachio.

But despite my best efforts at neatness, sweet little shards would flutter away to my clothing and usually also to the hotel room bedding.

A well made meringue is a tiny bit chewy and crisp before its airy sweetness melts away on the tongue. All of that loveliness from egg whites and sugar.

From Paris Sweets: Pavé Montmartre

Pavé Montmartre

Stone streets will wreck your fancy shoes — or cause you to stumble — yet this quite old and very well dressed woman glided along in her impossibly high heels. She never let a heel touch down on the old Paris street. I felt shabby in my Danish clogs.

I remembered her as I baked Pavé Montmartre, a recipe from Dorie Greenspan’s Paris Sweets, the book I am cooking in its entirety. It is an egg-rich almond cake that is wrapped in a thin sheet of almond paste, then lightly burnished in the oven for some color. It was designed to resemble a paving stone in Pâtisserie Arnaud Larher’s neighborhood.

From Paris Sweets: A Good Pie Crust Will Change Your Life

Tart au Chocolat from Paris Sweets by Dorie Greenspan

For a long time, I did not like pie crust. It could be bland or soggy or dry or burned—or all of those failings at once. Pie crust became the necessary and mostly ignored container for creamy or fruity filling that were eaten first. Some were homemade crusts but many were those things from the grocery store that, while convenient, just tasted a little off.

But once I tasted a crust made with butter, that made all the difference. Through the pleasures of travel, reading and pastry consumption, I’ve sampled different types of crusts. In French cooking, for instance, there are four basic breeds. Pâte fuilletée is puff pastry. Pâte brisée is your classic all-butter pie crust, perfect for savory or sweet fillings. Pâte sucrée and pâte sablée are for desserts. Both contain sugar, but a pâte sucrée also has whole eggs or egg yolks. It isn’t too far from what we know as a sugar cookie. A pâte sablée is flour, butter, sugar—essentially shortbread dough—pressed into a pie pan. This will be more crumbly, like a shortbread cookie. (A sablé, in fact, is French name for shortbread cookie.)