A cover for 'Anytime Cakes' + a carrot cake recipe + Paris
It's a catch-up roundup and a different kind of cake, all à la Parisienne
Bonjour! Bonjour!
And TA-DAH!
While my next book, Dorie’s Anytime Cakes, won’t be in the world officially until October 21, the cover, the gorgeous cover, designed my Melissa Lotfy around a fabulous illustration by Nancy Pappas, is here! I couldn’t love it more. Impossible. Won’t even try.
I love the cake on the cover — it’s my Holiday Bundt, a big cake with a tender crumb, speckles of fresh cranberries, a surprising spice combination and a stunning pink glaze. I love Nancy’s rendition of it — faithful, yet playful. I love the background color — kind of like my favorite French blue. And I love the layout — striking, clean, joyful and welcoming. I am so lucky to work with such talented people.
The book is available for preorder everywhere (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, which works with local bookstores across America). Its publication date is far off, but not. I’ll tell you more (maybe even too much more) about preordering and what we’ve got planned as we chug along, but for now I just wanted to share my excitement with you.
((A message to xoxoDorie’s Founding Friends: Last month, during a couple of Zoom visits with xoxoDorie’s Founding Friends, I gave everyone a sneak peek at the cover drafts we were considering. Thank you dear friends for piping up with your thoughts and preferences. I hope you’re happy with the choice. 💜))
👉 I’m packing a lot into this week’s newsletter — a walk through Notre Dame, some Paris restaurant recommendations, a look at an unusual breakfast pastry and a recipe for a cake that I love. Don’t miss the cake. [The recipe is paywalled as a thank you to paid subscribers, but I’ve included a gift link to my long-time favorite carrot cake, so please keep scrolling.]
A visit to Notre Dame
Having nothing to do with food and everything to do with feeding our spirits, Michael and I walked through Notre Dame Cathedral last week. Our friend Patrick stalked the ticket website — tickets are free, but hard to get. He was on the site at midnight and at 12:01 had five tickets for our happy little group. Merci, cher Patrick. He also suggested that we download the official Notre Dame app, which you can use as a tour guide — and we did. The renovated — is rebuilt more accurate? — cathedral is nothing short of stunning. Having seen the cathedral in ruins and having watched the reconstruction over the years (only five years, an astonishingly short time), stepping into the church, I had to catch my breath and hold back tears.
I think it will take a while for me to look at the cathedral as something other than an extraordinary accomplishment by a community with skills beyond measure — I was overwhelmed by the craftsmanship. I was also overwhelmed by the crowds, the kind of crush that visitors face trying to catch a glimpse of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. I am hoping to return many times, knowing that each time I will take away different feelings, even if I’m sure that no matter how often I go, I will always find myself touched by the grand rose windows and the small chapels where people light candles and find calm, even among the throngs.
Out and about in Paris
We’ve been eating home a bunch during this Paris stay and I’ve been cooking the kind of food I’ve been sharing with you, mamaliga and cauliflower gratin, fried rice, hachis Parmentier, and Suzy’s Cake, bien sûr — all part of my continuing quest to find comfort, joy and all things cozy. But we’ve also gone out.
And while we always return to favorites — we remain loyal fans of Bistrot Paul Bert, Juveniles and Mokonuts — we recently had the food of three super-talented women cheffes (a relatively recent word in the French lexicon) who were new to us, but whom we’ll be seeing again. And again.
We fell in love with Isabel Galinanes Garcia’s food — a thoughtful mix of French, Spanish and inspired cooking — when she was doing a pop-up at La Cave Paul Bert. She’s now doing a longer residency at Becquetance and if you’re in town while she is, you should try to nab a table. We were three for dinner and ordered all eight small plates on her menu — each was a winner. My personal favorites were the omen tomago (I can’t even describe the egg, the celeryroot puree, the roe, the deliciousness) and the mushroom empanadillas: We would have ordered another plate of the empanadillas, but we were saving room for the cream puff dessert.
I think I bookmarked Trâm 130 from the Le Fooding newsletter and I’m glad I did — what a treat. Priscilla Trâm’s food is that terrific and hard to achieve mix of sophisticated and finger-licking. The som tam salad was as full of flavor as it was elegant and the juicy, sticky, tamarind-glazed barbecued ribs were, as you’d hope they’d be, three-napkin eats. Michael and I both loved the squash croquettes.
Le Six has a new cheffe, Caroline Douroux, and she’s got a gift for balance. Every dish — and since we were five around the table, we got to taste most of her menu — tight-walked richness with acidity and surprising flavors with familiar favorites. The oysters had a soubise cream and parsley oil; the skate had cockles, harissa and fresh mint; and the chocolate mousse had black olive caramel. The next time we go, I want to have every vegetable dish she makes — her Jerusalem artichokes were exceptional, ditto her fried Brussels sprouts with yogurt and lemon pepper and the dauphine potatoes were good enough that if we weren’t all friends, we’ve have fought over the last one.
Moko Hirayama, who with her husband, Omar Koreiten, owns Mokonuts and Mokoloco, is not new to me — I’ve known her for years and loved her from day one — but she’s got a new place, Mokochaya, and it is simply wonderful. It’s open for breakfast, lunch, tea and sweets of course. No one bakes like Moko — she is a complete original! The bento boxes at lunch are dreamy.
Pain Perdu Muffins
I met my friend Hélène Samuel for coffee the other morning at one our favorite pastry shops, Mille et Un, and while I usually have a black sesame madeleine as a nibble-along, I changed-up my routine and went for their Pain Perdu. Pain perdu, which translates to “lost bread,” is what we call French toast. At Mille et Un, the chef takes the stale lost bread, mixes it with an egg and cream custard, adds some dried cranberries and bakes it in a muffin tin. Kind of like bread budding, but not really. There’s more to it than that.
It was Hélène who first clocked that the bread in the pudding was something other than an egg bread, like brioche, and not baguette. And what was that nice crunch on top? It was novel. I was already reverse engineering the recipe in my head, when we chatted with the chef.
The recipe is not complicated, but it requires ingredients most of us don’t stockpile: viennoiserie, think pain aux raisins and croissants and other sweets made from caramelized puff pastry. I mean, maybe we could make it with leftover croissants? Yes, I’m going to try. And that crunch on top? It didn’t come from a sprinkle of sugar and the oven’s heat — it was more deliberate than that. The crunch is streusel — largish strips of it. And there’s not as much custard as there usually is in bread pudding — this pain perdu is a bit sturdier. And hardly sweet. While I work on a recipe, take a look at it.
And now for something different.. a Parisian Carrot Cake
The sweet life is in flux in Paris — has been for a while. Cookies are everywhere — and they’re big. Big in popularity and very big in size — think cookies inspired by those at Levain. Muffins are commonplace. Banana breads are everywhere — I really like the one at Café du Clown in the Marché Saint Germain. Pecans are popular — more often they’re in tarts than pies, but the caramelized top and gooey innards are there. And there are carrot cakes. They’re rarely as tall and multilayered as my all-time favorite Big Bill’s Carrot Cake (gift link/no paywall), but there’s plenty of cream cheese frosting around town. I’m not sure how surprised French people are by these American-style cakes and I wonder how surprised you, my readers from so many countries, will be by today’s recipe — a carrot cake that shares almost nothing with the ones we love in America except the carrots (and there aren’t too many of those).
This cake, a riff on one in Baking Chez Moi, is low and unassuming. Its color evokes the glow of sunshine, and its taste swings more fruit than vegetable, more orange and ginger than carrot, which serves up color and texture and just a hint of flavor — it’s a supporting role and one we’re not used to. The cake’s crumb is exceedingly tender — there’s a little chew, but mostly it’s like a great cupcake. The glaze is sweet, of course, but not just sweet — the orange flavor is there too.
This cake is not in Dorie’s Anytime Cakes, but after I finished glazing it, I thought it could have been. It would have fit right in with the style of so many of the book’s recipes: It’s simple, easy to make, packed with flavor and just enough out of the ordinary to be surprising.
As easy to make as it is, I managed to take a misstep — I really wanted the edges to be fluted and so I baked the cake in a tart pan with a removable bottom. You can’t tell from the pictures, but the batter seeped out and baked to the bottom of the pan. Getting it off the pan’s base was annoying — thank you Michael for patiently prying it off and onto a platter. The look is great! Would I put up with that bit of finickiness again to get that beauty? Hmm. I might … but only if Michael’s in the house.
These are head-spinning times. Please take care of yourself and those around you. Let’s help one another. Let’s share hugs, happy moments, good stories and cake.
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PARISIAN CARROT CAKE
