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If you've ever spent too many Google hours typing "Ewald + Notter," hoping to perfect your pastillage (sculptures made from a powdered sugar "dough") technique, The Art of the Confectioner is the book of your blown sugar sculpture dreams.

Notter's The Art of the Confectioner is yet another pastry cog in Wiley's "professional" series, the sort of cookbooks that make you wonder why you spent so much on pastry school when $65 ($25 less on Amazon) perhaps would have sufficed.

Then again, you wouldn't have had the pleasure of watching that Boeing engineer, who enrolled just for the NASA sculpture fun of it, blow out such a remarkable space shuttle sugar sculpture, it made up for all of those simple cookie recipes he never could quite master.

But we were supposed to be talking about The Art of the Confectioner.

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Since opening in April 2010, Coffee Commissary has consistently brewed top-notch beans from the likes of Coava, Sightglass and Victrola, earning a spot among our Top 10 Coffee Shops in L.A. The minimalist Fairfax Avenue cafe is finally getting a pastry program to match thanks to Naomi Shim, who previously oversaw the pastries at Salt's Cure.

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Normally, baking books by top restaurant pastry chefs, at least the Michelin-star type, are big. And glossy. As with the previous cookbooks from French pastry chef and former London restaurateur Michel Roux (his son now runs La Gavroche restaurant), you needed those gorgeous super-sized photos to convince you to take the time to actually make that chocolate mousse filled with lavender crémeux and served with a mixed berry compote. A time-consuming mouthful.

The beauty of Roux's new cookbook, Desserts, is that it is small. Not quite stocking-stuffer small, but small enough for that caramel bavarois with saffron roasted apples to peek out of the top of a stocking.

And don't let that brownie recipe on the cover photo lead you astray. Desserts is definitely "Oh my gosh, you really got me this?!" worthy.

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Langham Huntington Hotel

The chocolate tea service

Augustus Gloop would never make it out alive. What makes Pasadena's Langham Huntington Hotel the best choice for afternoon tea can be summed up in one word: chocolate. On Sundays from noon to 5 p.m., the hotel's regular tea service, smashing in itself, is replaced by an all-chocolate afternoon tea. The selection of savory tea sandwiches, scones with Devonshire cream, fruit tarts, mousse torts and crème brûlées all contain different chocolate essences. A chocolate fountain is the focal point of the afternoon ritual, with surrounding chocolate sculptural art.

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D. Gonzalez

Maybe one... or two: Borekas from Tarte Tatin Bakery

Usually, there's one overarching purpose that drives most visits to a bakery: a straight dose of the sweet stuff. That was our mission when we first visited the recently turned 1-year-old Beverly Hills bakery Tarte Tatin. But when looking over their pastry shelf, it wasn't some powdered sugar dusted specimen that first captured our gaze. It was a black and white sesame seed speckled savory Israeli turnover, their borekas.

Tarte Tatin's sweets are quite exemplary. Gauzy Viennoiserie like plump pain au chocolat and twists scented with with vanilla and dredged in cinnamon. Then there are the galettes, flaky crusts suspending deep pools of seasonal fruit (plum on our most recent visit). Although some of our visits are still driven for the taste of something sweet, we never leave without grabbing at least one of their feta-filled borekas.

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Jim Thurman

Pig shaped mooncake.

While normally round or square, mooncakes can also be found shaped like fish or rabbits (representing the Year of the Rabbit), but it's this little pig that caught our attention. While animal shaped mooncakes are primarily aimed at kids, who doesn't love anything pig-shaped? Squid Ink recently featured a pig shaped lighter, and in the San Gabriel Valley, one can find all manner of porcine items, ranging from children's toys to a pig-shaped vaporizer.

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Eugene Ahn of Forage Restaurant in Silver Lake

Chef Kristin Ferguson's Strawberry Galette

A traditional French fruit galette is a free-form tart made with a basic pâte brisée dough. The galette shell is rolled out into a disk, topped with fresh berries or fruit and the edges folded over by hand. There's no special equipment required, no fussing with an unwieldy dough that really doesn't want to be tamed and crimped into a fancy tart tin and no blind baking required. Kristin Ferguson, pastry chef at Forage in Silver Lake and instructor at Ecole de Cuisine, makes hers with pre-made puff-pastry purchased at Epicure in North Hollywod. Nicole's in South Pasadena also sells all butter puff pastry. Don't bother using packaged puff pastry sheets that are made with oil, they tend to bake into greasy messes and obviously don't have the rich flavor of butter.

Actually, it's not very difficult to make puff pastry. But it's time consuming and not worth the effort for a rustic tart that should be by definition easy to make. There's a happy medium between Martha Stewart and Sandra Lee. Turn the page for Kristin Ferguson's recipe for strawberry galette.

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Patricia Escusa

French Fruit Tart Prepared by Patrica Escusa, Test Kitchen Assistant

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Every year, during elementary school, we made something for Mother's Day as a class project. If your mother really did you love you, she probably still has a stash of butterfly and heart shaped cards as reminders of how sweet you were before you entered puberty and stopped making gifts out of construction paper and glitter glue. In France, a tart is a traditional gift for Mother's day. A French tart with a tender sugar cookie like crust, filled with chilled pastry cream and topped with cold raw fruit is worth turning the oven on for, even in this heat.

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J. Garbee

From Leimert Park To LAX, 5 a.m. Sharp

Ah, the information curse of the friendly skies. Once you realize that some people are sipping beer at their gate, that crappy cappuccino in your open container-averse airport manages to taste even worse. Fortunately, though TSA's three ounce liquid rules have substantially changed our flying strategy over the years, our baking patterns have not been interrupted by x-ray scanners. We can still (and do) bring on board as many homemade cookies, granola bars and baguettes as we please. Because surely no one - except in truly dire hunger situations -- buys those dense, stale pastries lining LAX's airport concession counters? We're hoping Huckleberry makes an LAX concession bid, too.

In the meantime, if you happen to be in the recently revamped Tom Bradley International Terminal, you can actually score a really great, freshly made croissant at Eurotal coffee. Honest.

How could any airport-sponsored baked good be so buttery, flaky and preservative free? Because it isn't made by a corporate bakery but by a pedigreed French chef who is as obsessed about his croissants as he is about his chocolate. Yes, we are fairly certain Yvan Valentin never sleeps.

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In Cara Black's soon to be released Paris-based noir mystery novel, Murder in Passy, (Soho Press), a computer-savvy French-American private investigator named Aimee Leduc gets an ill-tempered elderly woman to spill the beans on her neighbor by going low-tech: She plies her with something called Gâteau Basque.

Gâteau Basque? What is this dessert? we wondered. Judging from the description we knew it was small, toasty brown, smelled of cherries and was so delicious that just the sight of it made people -- even wealthy 16th arrondissement dwellers -- want to cooperate. To investigate further we turned to the award-winning Dorie Greenspan, author of ten cookbooks, including Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours.

Turn the page for our converstation, and be sure to check back later today for Greenspan's recipe for Gâteau Basque.

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