Cheapest Paris Sweets: Great Desserts From the City's Best Pastry Shops

Over All Rating Reviews :

I ordered this book because it was the only cookbook I could find that included a recipe for Opera Cake. Opera Cake is my husband's favorite dessert, and so I thought I would make it for his birthday. Well, unfortunately, I learned that the recipe for Opera Cake actually has six (yes, SIX) subrecipes, and would probably take me about 3 days to make ... and with a new baby, I wouldn't have three days to spend on a dessert. So the Opera Cake, the original rationale for getting the book, never got made. But still, I found it somehow heartening that such a complicated recipe could be broken down into readable and comprehensible component parts ... something that a mere mortal could actually reproduce in her own American home kitchen - if she had three days and didn't happen to have a newborn to cater to, that is.

One small disappointment was that Greenspan doesn't give a recipe for almond macaroons (macarons), which were my favorite treat when I spent a little time in France. She just gives a lengthy description of how wonderful they are and says they are hard for the home cook to reproduce. I know she is right in saying so, as I did try to make them once at home using the recipe in Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook, and they turned nothing like the ones I'd had in France and I considered that recipe a failure. Still, on Amazon.fr there are about 20 different single-subject cookbooks in French on making macarons at home, so I still hold out hope that it's actually possible and I'll find a good recipe someday (or get around to ordering one of the French-language macaron treatises).

That said, this cookbook is a delight in every other way. The book is partly a travelogue describing the atmosphere and offerings at Paris's most famous patisseries, and her writing is so evocative, and so charmingly illustrated with line drawings, that you while reading you tend to feel as if you were standing in front of a gleaming case of sweetly scented pastries with a rotund pastry chef behind the counter sending up clouds of artisanal flour as you contemplate your order in line behind an elegant femme in couture high-heels leading a poodle on a leash.

Along with the travelogue descriptions you get the occasional informative discourse on ingredients such as chocolate and flour and eggs and how the ones the French pastry chefs use are different from ours.

And, of course, there are recipes, wonderful recipes. I made the choclate sables, and they were easy, and totally addictive as Greenspan warns. And I made the hot chocolate and it was so rich I had palpitations afterwards, but the taste was worth the risk of a heart attack. (And it was also easy peasy to make. I called my mom and gave her the recipe over the phone.)

Ten stars for this wonderful book.

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