Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.- Chili Davis I don’t know which astonishes me the most: that I have reached this age and am still standing or that I am standing on the threshold of our second year at the Hôtel Diderot … and I am still standing. “Oh, grow up!” he often says to me ...
Amaretto Brownies with Amaretti
From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining. - Leonard Bernstein It’s the same thing, year in and year out. December comes to a lively end, a rousing, bubbly conclusion, flowing by faster than we could ever have imagined. As the end of one year draws ...
Dust to Dust
A life without love in it is like a heap of ashes upon a deserted hearth, with Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery I pick through the ashes of my childhood, like sifting for gold ...
Decadent Chocolate Cake with Christmas Spices
Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn't come from a store. - Dr. Seuss The weather is mild, much milder than anyone of us would have expected. Or desired. Breakfast is served in a dim dining room early morning, warmth and light blazing from the fireplace, the old fourteenth century fireplace of limestone and wood, while outside ...
Chocolate Chestnut Fondant
Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humor, and like enough to consent. - William Shakespeare I love the holidays. Halloween comes and goes swathed in orange and black, tiny marzipan jack-o’-lanterns and chocolate skeletons dancing across supermarket shelves and shop windows. Thanksgiving arrives sharp on its heels in a burst ...
Chocolate Chestnut Rum Christmas Bûche
The sincere friends of this world are as ship lights in the stormiest of nights. - Giotto di Bondone Forty-two years ago, a young man on the brink of adulthood, a young man just seventeen years old and soon having the heavy responsibility of choosing his future career, of selecting his university, stood in the ...
Chocolate Spice Cake with Cherries
Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power. it is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits. - Baron Justus von Liebig, 1893 National Chocolate Day. I have never quite understood these national and international food days, the celebration of this foodstuff or that, and the ...
Cocoa Espresso Almond Sponge Cake for Passover (Gluten-free)
Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought. – Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems This is an odd time of the year for me. Passover – and I imagine Easter for those who celebrate it – is a time of celebration, redemption and rebirth. But it is also a time of memory, both the good and ...
Dark Chocolate Sesame Truffles
Whosoever says truffle, utters a grand word, which awakens erotic and gastronomic ideas.... - Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste Of course Brillat-Savarin was writing about the tuber, the earthy truffle snuffled up by pigs, priced like gold, and then eaten in savory dishes finely shaved. But cannot I say the same of these astonishing, rich ...
Chocolate Gingerbread Macarons
Mieux vaut déceler une faiblesse que se laisser soupçonner d'un vice. (Better to reveal a weakness than be suspected of a vice.) - Denis Diderot, Jacques le fataliste et son maître, 1765 – 1784 Macarons, that elegant cross between a confection and a pastry, that tiny, sweet specialty of France. Lovely, they are, yet fussy and temperamental ...