I have some more great photos of readers’ versions of my recipes. I take endless pleasure in seeing how my desserts get made and remade out there in the world. It’s really a treat.

Bea at La Tartine Gourmande strikes again, with a wonderful post about making the custard filled vanilla cakes that are pictured in the book (and which I describe how to make here). There are several beautiful photos of the final results. Here is one:

Over at Cookies and et cetera, Paul made perfect looking versions of my Almond Honey Caramel Chews. And he says they were perfect tasting as well, so I’m thrilled:

And Paul, Vivien, Eva, Michael, Claire and my dad spent an evening together making my Maple Walnut Souffles. And they even rose!

I first met Mike when he featured me on his PBS television show, and we hit it off from the start. He’s fun, funny, and a perfect host, and now that he’s got a regular daily gig on WOR Radio here in NY, Food Talk with Mike Colameco, I’ve been dropping in every few weeks to answer pastry and baking questions. Here are two links to the shows I’ve done with him:

January 31, 2007

January 10, 2007

I made an appearance today on the local Fox morning show. It was fun — relaxed, great hosts, and chocolate pot de cremes! Here’s a link to the segment. Thanks to the folks at Savory New York for hosting me on their segment with Fox.

One of the most extraordinary things about having written and published The Sweet Life continues to be the experience of reading about and seeing the results of my readers making my desserts. It’s just amazing to actually view the photos on food blogs and emails, not just hope that my recipes are working.

So, I’m going to link to and post some of the beautiful photos I’ve found, either on blogs or in emails sent to me, of my desserts. I hope they make you hungry!

First up, two versions of my Honey-Roasted Pears, featured on the front cover of the book.

Here’s a version from Veronica’s Test Kitchen:

My dear friends Deborah, Suzanne and the two Erichs made the pears for their Christmas dinner, and sent along two great photographs, one of the pears, and one of Suzanne making them:

At Dessert First, Anita the PastryGirl tried a couple of my ice creams and cookies, and also provided an interesting report on her test run of her new ice cream machine. Here’s the Mandarin Orange Sorbet with Hazelnut Shortbread:

And here’s the Apple Cider and Caramel Ice Cream:

Erin over at Ahi to Ziti posted about the Chocolate Almond Cracks, which I made on the CBS Morning Show:

Cenk at Cafe Fernando made the Chocolate Caramel Pot de Creme, and he also emailed to say hello all the way from Turkey:

One of the things that’s most exciting about getting to see the results of people making your recipes is seeing their variations. Over at Cook & Eat, Lara transformed my Cardamom and Honey Pistachio Nougat Glacé into a Honey Elderflower Glacé:

An even more creative spin on one of my recipes is this Vanilla, Brown Butter & Hazelnut Cake with Warm White Chocolate & Truffle Honey Filling; Truffle Honey Ice Cream; Apricots in Vanilla & Earl Grey Tea Caramel, produced by Joycelyn at Kuidaore. I love using truffle honey — the bread pudding in the book uses a truffle honey drizzling to make it special — and I love filling my Vanilla, Brown Butter and Almond Tea Cake with warm, oozy things, so I was really tickled by this one:

What’s most rewarding these variations on my recipes is that it reminds me of exactly how I do my job: I find techniques that appeal to my senses, then I add flavors and textures that I adore, and then I play around, make adjustments, and suddenly I have a whole new recipe.

With Meyer lemons currently in season, my Aunt Judi’s friend Joan made a Meyer Lemon Curd Tart, with beautiful lemon zest decorating the edges of the tart:

And I think my Uncle John might have been the very first person to send me a photo of one of my recipes. He made the Goat Cheesecake Enrobed in Hazelnut Brittle, all the way back in October:

I apologize to everyone out there for disappearing for the last month. December through the New Year is the busiest time of year in the restaurant business, particularly at restaurants like Chanterelle, and I simply haven’t had any time to think about blogging or even responding to emails. But I’m looking forward to posting on a number of topics in the next couple of days — starting now!

About.com has posted a terrific review of the book. I think the reviewer really got what I was aiming for, which was to create very explicit and clear recipes that don’t make you read between the lines or guess what to do at every turn.

And here’s an interview I did for GlobalChefs. Jeremy Emmerson, who conducted the interview, wrote that “Could this be the best cookbook I have seen in 2006?
Every year there’s one, a ‘home run’ of a cookbook and this year I think Kate Zuckerman is the one that’s hit it!” Thanks, Jeremy!

My publisher, Bulfinch Press, asked me to write a short essay about what I learned while putting my book together. It’s available on their website , but here it is:

About two years ago, during the time when I was first contemplating writing The Sweet Life, I was in the process of rolling pate sucree, sweet tart dough, on a stainless steel worktable while simultaneously trying to explain to a pastry intern at Chanterelle how to whip egg whites for a batch of Goat Cheese and Basil Souffles. Standing right next to her, but admittedly with my attention somewhat divided, I was walking her through the process of whipping egg whites, as she looked into the mixer’s bowl, cream of tartar in one hand, sugar in the other. What I wanted her to produce was a shiny, voluminous, smooth meringue with stiff peaks. To get them to that stage you need to add acid and sugar at specific moments. I thought I’d be able to explain to her, without peeking into the bowl, what to look for: how to know when to add the cream of tartar, when to add the numerous teaspoons of sugar, at what speed to whip the eggs, and, most importantly, when to stop.

It didn’t work. What I got instead was a bowl full of chunky, mealy egg whites that were leaking liquid: classic overbeaten egg whites, which, if I tried to use for the soufflés, would produce a dessert with big white hunks in a barely risen soufflé that would be runny and unpleasant. So we did it again, and I stood next to her, looking into the bowl.

This experience stayed with me when I set out to write The Sweet Life. If I wasn’t able to verbally explain the steps needed to whip up egg whites, how would I manage to instruct a reader whose bowl I certainly wouldn’t be able to look into?

I recognized that, when I whip a bowl of egg whites, I’m looking for subtle visual and sensual clues that key me into coaxing a meringue to take shape with maximum volume, a lustrous shine, a homogenous texture, and a stiff mountain of peaks. But these clues are not explicit; they’re experiential and ephemeral, and almost impossible to write down without a broader context. That context, I realized, was what is actually happening to the egg white proteins on a chemical level. If I could better understand why egg whites whip - and why acid and sugar and the right agitating tool used at the right speed are needed - maybe I could really teach a far away reader how to do it without needing to check on her results.

So, I began studying some of the chemistry of the pastry kitchen. I had a lot of help, from classic books like Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking and Shirley Corriher’s CookWise, as well as from Kirsten Hubbard, a culinary student of mine who turned out to be a physicist with a burgeoning interest in food science. It was in the process of writing this all down, making it explicit and clear in decent English, that I really came to understand what has always been happening in my stainless steel bowls when I’m whipping egg whites.

Writing this book has made me an immeasurably better pastry chef: it’s aroused so much curiosity and desire to explicate the experiences I have in the pastry kitchen. Really, it’s the people who’ll cook from my book that I have to thank for this, and I hope that by reading The Sweet Life they’ll sense me standing next to them, looking into their bowls, watching for the clues that hopefully are no longer so mysterious.

Copyright © 2006 by Kate Zuckerman

I haven’t had much time to post to the blog in the last week, since there have been a lot of live promotional events for the book, including a 45 minute demo at the wildly well-attended Chocolate Show here in New York this past Sunday.

But catching up on what’s happening on-line, I found this lovely post about my book and my Apple and Quince Tart recipe, filled with absolutely beautiful photos, by Bea, proprietress of La Tartine Gourmande.

Your greatest hope when you write a book like The Sweet Life is that your readers will actually make and enjoy your recipes. Seeing my tarts brought to life by one of my readers is a truly wonderful feeling, and I’m so grateful to Bea and to all my other readers for welcoming me into their kitchens.

Here’s one of Bea’s gorgeous photos of the Apple and Quince Tarts:

Thanks, Bea!

Tuesday’s Women’s Wear Daily ran a very nice profile of me. Here it is:

Just Desserts
By Emily Holt
NEW YORK — When she’s not picking figs and quinces from the trees in her Brooklyn yard, pastry chef Kate Zuckerman is whipping up sophisticated desserts like raspberry lemon verbena napolean for the refined palettes at Chanterelle in TriBeCa.

And she traces a similar path in her first cookbook, “The Sweet Life,” out now from Bulfinch Press. Alongside recipes for passion fruit glacés and hazelnut cake, Zuckerman, a former anthropology student, offers helpful scientific and horticultural tips on ingredients and how they react with other foods in the baking process. “I enjoy researching topics that are very familiar to people,” she says. “It’s what I like to do with food — talk about things you use every day and sort of dig them up a little.”

Zuckerman started cooking for her two older brothers. “They’re both very tall and have endless appetites, so when they were in high school, I made my way through Maida Heatter’s ‘Great Book of Desserts,’ recipe by recipe.”

The petite mother of two has now moved on to baking for her own children — and sweets are on the menu, despite the current vogue to put children on strict sugar-free diets. “My son loves these malted meringues with gooey milk chocolate, sort of glorified Whoppers,” she says. “He’s really picky and only likes chocolate. But my four-year-old daughter surprises me” in terms of what she’ll try.

The kids aren’t just willing taste testers, they’re also hands-on. “We just made an apple tart this weekend, with brown butter and vanilla bean and fig and apples,” she says. “I usually lay out the apples in beautiful rows, but they wanted to do something, so I just let them. It looked terrible.”

And, of course, Zuckerman is still learning herself. “If I went back to college now, I’d study chemistry,” she says. “I know I have to beat egg whites on the first day that I crack them open to get panna cotta to set….Cooking to me is about doing things over and over again and seeing subtleties. A home cook doesn’t have that opportunity, so you really need to give them an idea of what you’re experiencing as a chef.”

One tip she can offer for the layman or -woman: In case of a disaster, like the all-too-common fallen soufflé, there’s nothing to be done but to eat it. “It still tastes good,” she swears. “A lot of people serve fallen soufflé. It’s just like a warm pudding.”

Holly Brubach wrote the loveliest review of The Sweet Life in today’s New York Times T Style Magazine, along with reviews of Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours and Rose Carrarini’s Breakfast, Lunch, Tea.

One highlight: “The acclaimed pastry chef for a renowned culinary destination, Zuckerman proves a remarkably patient and thoughtful mentor when it comes to shepherding us perennial amateurs through processes that to her are surely second nature. … Fascinating and informative.”

The article also includes a version of my Apple and Quince Tart from the book.

Thanks, Holly!