Desserts Francais ? French Desserts (compilation)

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

Bonjour !

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

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.

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).

Lorraine

Vautes aux cerises (cherry old style pancake)

Glace reine des fraises

Tartes aux brimbelles (wild blueberry tart)

Mademoiselle Proust, petite madeleine lorraine

Limousin et Centre

Clafoutis limousin -Real clafoutis

Petits millas aux raisins secs (raisin corn bread)

Millas et compote de kabocha

Bretagne

I heart kouign amann

Far, far, far…

Congolais

Lait d’amandes

Briochettes a l’anis

Moricette a l’anis

Creme Mont-Blanc de quand on etait petits (Canned vanilla milk pudding)

Creme Mont-Blanc aux marrons



Quatre-quarts, the simple butter cake

Truffes a la pomme nouvelle

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NOUVEAUX STYLES

Bouchons au matcha

Nashi Belle-Helene, truffe au sesame

Sorbet de cacao grand frisson

Creme aux roses

Sakura blanc-manger

Mousse de lait a la mangue

La flamme douce a la pomme

Tartelettes citron-chocolat

Souffle de potimarron (dessert pumpkin souffle)

Fraises cache-cache (souffle with strawberries)