Abrams Books

Bake It Like You Mean It

Really, April is the ideal time to Bake it Like You Mean it, as we could probably all use a little post-Spring Break malakofftorte à la raymo (chocolate ladyfinger cake, here filled with Kahlua cream) kitchen therapy.

This is the third in a recent series of pastry books from Gesine Bullock-Prado (among her previous titles is the fantastic candy book, Sugar Baby). She again gets brownie points for not referencing her celebrity sister, Sandra Bullock, on the book jacket, press release or elswhere, as so many cookbook authors with pedigreed genes seem to blare through loudspeakers today. Nor does Bullock-Prado need to, as she has more than enough talent of her own. So much, that we will forgive her/the publisher for the self help book-worthy subtitle: Gorgeous Cakes From Inside Out.

Bake It Like you Mean It is filled with the sort of entertaining-worthy cakes and pastries that will have you wishing for a rainy spring weekend. Two words: Creamsicle cheesecake.

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A. Scattergood

macarons at Bouchon Bakery

French macarons are glorious confections, little sandwiches of buttercream or ganache filling pressed between two meringue disks. (They are not to be confused with macaroons, which are coconut, and most definitely do not resemble tiny round pastry sandwiches.) When well-made, macarons are delicate combinations of crunch and cream. What also distinguishes them, and makes them the hands-down favorite amongst 6th grade girls, is the vast array of colors and flavors pastry chefs can give to them. Pierre Hermé famously made Ispahan macarons of rose, lychee and raspberry; he also liked to flavor his macarons with ketchup, cornichons and hot sauce. (Maybe don't try this unless you're Pierre Hermé.)

You can make your own macarons (with or without ketchup), as they're somewhat labor-intensive but not that much harder than making, well, meringues and buttercream. (See Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bakery, p. 58.) In L.A., you can buy them from Les Macarons Duverger, who sells them at Monsieur Marcel and even Whole Foods. You can get your macarons filled with ice cream at Milk, or the size of hockey pucks at Lemonade, where they'll cost you $4 a pop. Or you can venture out to a happy number of local patisseries, bakeries and bistros and buy them singly or by the box, preferably with a demitasse of espresso. Turn the page for our 10 favorites.

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A. Scattergood

macarons at Jin Patisserie

For all of you who love nothing better than to sip tea and eat Kristy Choo's glorious macarons on Jin Patisserie's charming outside patio, you're going to need to get there soon for a few last tea times. Choo's Abbott Kinney shop will be closing its doors for good on Sunday, March 24.

Choo cites a big jump in her rent as the reason for the shop's closing after almost 10 years in its current location. BUT before you all freak out entirely, Choo also assures us that she's looking for a new location and hopes to reopen soon. In the meantime, maybe get over to Venice -- she's having a tea sale -- and enjoy those remarkable pastries and chocolates while you can.

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Shako Liu

Fugetsu-Do Confectioners, a mochi shop in downtown Los Angeles, will celebrate its 110th anniversary this fall. The family-run sweet shop was founded by Seiichi Kito in 1903. In Japanese culture, mochi, a Japanese rice cake made of glutinous rice, is a favorite food for New Year's Day. Fugetsu-Do's current owner Brian Kito, Seiichi Kito's grandson, combines the tradition with a modern twist, adding colors and different fillings -- chocolate and peanut butter, for example -- to the hand-made rice cake recipe he inherited from his grandfather.

"We use pastries in funerals, showers, certain birthdays in the Japanese culture," Kito says. "We also use them for certain religious ceremonies and holidays -- New Year's Day is generally a day to eat mochi."

Recently we caught up with Kito to ask him about the upcoming anniversary. For the video, turn the page.

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A. Scattergood

Copenhagen Pastry's marzipan pig

There are many reasons to stop by Copenhagen Pastry, the bakery and retail shop in Culver City owned and operated by Danish native and longtime Angeleno Karen Hansen. The dark, seed-covered loaves of rye bread. The little bags of holiday sugar cookies. The LAMill coffee. The trays of freshly baked flødeboller and Napoleon hats and almond paste-filled kranse cakes in the enormous case. Since Hansen opened in June, the bakery has been turning out excellent pastries and baked goods in the ægte style of Hansen's homeland.

But in the next few days before Christmas, possibly the best reason to visit Copenhagen Pastry is the enormous marzipan pigs that Hansen has been selling. Imagine your favorite Charlotte's Web-style pig, made entirely out of almond paste and wrapped in a ribbon. What to do with these glorious pigs? Well, you can eat them whole in one sitting, as a certain 11-year-old girl will doubtless be doing when she finds one in her stocking next week.

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G. Snyder

Croissant at Maison Giraud

In his 1989 novel The Great Fire of London, renowned french author Jacques Roubaud spends a rather large section expounding the features of the ideal Parisian croissant, told in the kind of deliberate detail you'd expect from a professor of both poetry and advanced mathematics:

[T]he croissant that might be labeled the archetypal butter croissant, presents the following features: a very elongated rhombus, rounded at the tips but with an almost straight body (only the plain croissant, and it alone, has a lunar, ottomanlike look)--golden--plump--not too well-done--nor too white or starchy--staining your fingers through the India paper that wraps or rather holds it together--still warm (from the oven it's only recently left: not yet cooled) [...] It has three principal components, and three interlocking meaty compartments protected by a tender shell that lends it certain similarities to a young lobster.

It wasn't long ago that finding a great croissant, one that essentially resembled a fine slab of French butter empowered with crunch, flake, and tenderness, was a exercise that ended in either disappointment or compromise. Times have changed, it seems. After sampling a host of croissants from some of the most serious bakeries in L.A., we narrowed in down to the top three bakeries, all of which opened within the past year. Did 2012 mark the coming of the croissant renaissance?

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Rachael Narins

Pecan Sticky Bun

Pecan sticky buns are based on a German dish, then super-sized, amped up with more sweetener and topped -- or bottomed, if it's an upside-down version -- with a nut that's native to our shores. But what sets the truly American version apart from other nut-rolls though is that long baptism in the namesake sticky sugar-butter sauce. They can be made in a pan or on a sheet, covered in frosting or not, but they'll always be made with a yeasted dough, and sweet enough to make dessert pretty irrelevant.

In L.A. we found that the pecan sticky bun is almost always an even better choice than the cinnamon roll, if such a thing is possible. They might not always have actual pecans -- sometimes walnuts make an appearance, but they are always, as advertised, sticky and worth every bite. For the results of our exhaustive hunt for the best choices around town, turn the page.

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A. Scattergood

Macarons at EuroPane

As you may have noticed, this year's Best Of issue dropped on your doorstep, metaphorically if not actually, last week. There are hundreds (yes, hundreds) of listings, of spas and hikes and cocktails and grottos (yes, grottos), so many that you might get lost -- so many that we thought we'd pull out a few highlights. Drop some breadcrumbs, so to speak. In this case, some of the best pastries and desserts, and the places to find them, in town. Turn the page.

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A. Trachta

Robyn Wilson and Jarrid Masse at the Poor Porker stand

On the booth hangs a mirror for customers to double-check their mouths. "I've walked around with powdered sugar on my face so many times!" says Robyn Wilson, one half of the incredibly charming couple that makes up The Poor Porker -- a makeshift, traveling coffee and beignet stand that sets up shop all over L.A., as well as Lakeland, Florida, depending on where Wilson and partner Jarrid Masse feel like being that week.

Wilson, a former caterer for touring bands, and Masse, a self-proclaimed jack-of-all-trades, ("She's the only one who can put up with my manic-ness," Masse says of Wilson) are living the dream. It's a simple, semi-rootless, freewheeling, DIY life, in which they travel here and there, popping up their handmade wooden booth, frying beignets to order. Really delicious beignets at that, along with iced coffee bearing the unique flavor of chicory smoked in hickory and applewood.

And they're so damn cute you almost wish they'd invite you into a thrupple. So how could they afford, as Cake would say, their rock n' roll lifestyle? Well, they couldn't.

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USDAgov

Bill Yosses is on the left (White House chef Sam Kass is on the right)

Obama is in big trouble. Last election, he slipped by, almost tanking in the wake of the 2007 arugula dust-up. It was also reported, with near-devastating fall-out, that the would-be leader preferred wine to beer. And now, over four years later, the incumbent faces yet another scandal. It's not the birth certificate. It's not his middle name. It's far, far worse. According to the great blog Obama Foodorama, Obama has been associating with unsavory types -- namely a pastry chef who runs around showing off his molecular gastronomy skills, eschewing nature's bounty for chemical compounds and claiming, if the ever-reliable conspiracy rags are to be believed, that all Americans will soon be assimilated.

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