The 3rd birthday of the week! This morning I baked another bunch of cupcakes for my dear friend Heather. One of the best chocolate cupcake I've ever made if not THE best. The cupcakes are extremely light and a little bit bitter with the dark chocolate dough, and the Nutella makes the center super sweet and creamy. A perfect combo! I've topped the cupcakes with some fondant (black & white leftovers from this recipe). Really easy to make, I basically cut rounds with a glass a "glued" them on top of the cupcakes with some Nutella. ... [Lire la suite]

Another birthday this week end! And this time one of my boyfriend's coworkers. So I wanted, once again, to bake something related to movies. It was my first time using fondant so I wanted to keep it simple. I choose to bake a clapboard cake : 2 vanilla cakes covered with chocolate frosting and black & white fondant, nothing really complicated. I had to "patch" some parts of the cake with the fondant and my hand writing is terrible... So the result is not as good as I was expecting. Next time I'll use something else than icing... [Lire la suite]

I love carrot cakes. Unfortunately we don't have them in France. Not at all, except in some few British/American pastry shops in Paris. One of my great pleasure back in France was to go to London for a week end and eat as much carrot cakes as possible... They are just so good. And for some reason I never had a bad one. I don't know if it's because it's easy to make or if I just got lucky but having the ooportunity to taste some in London, New-York, Paris and Los Angeles, I always enjoyed them. Yesterday was the birthday of a dear... [Lire la suite]

Before moving to the USA I never had a sugar cookie covered with royal icing before. It sounds and look way to sweet for me and we don't have them in France anyway. Whereas in America you can find them everywhere for Christmas, Haloween, Easter.... every occasion as its cookie. I think it's a really American tradition. I'm not sure if they have those cookies here in Australia... Or at least I never saw them. I guess I'll find out by myself in the coming days...I have to admit that although I wasn't really excited by tasting those... [Lire la suite]

Reading the tittle some might think "Yum!" and some might think "Yikes!". But please don't knock it until you've tried it! It's absolutely delicious and has become my new comfort food. It's so simple, easy and yummy! Please give it a try! You won't regret it. Nigella uses Marmite but you can use Vegemite instead. If you want to see the recipe you can watch the beautiful Nigella here.   Ingredients:- 375g dried spaghetti- 50g unsalted butter  - 1 teaspoon Marmite or more, to taste- freshly grated Parmesan cheese to... [Lire la suite]

If you think that bread is hard to make you should start with baking a focaccia. Focaccias are the equivalent of our french Fougasses. The texture is similar to pizza doughs but thicker and topped with sea salt, herbs and sometimes cheeses or even meat (which, in that case, is a whole meal by itself).  It's easy to make and only requires 10 minutes kneading. All you really have to do is wait for the dough to rise. This is a classic rosemary & olives foccacia, nothing fancy. But it's delicious! Perfect as an appetizer, you can... [Lire la suite]