 Treat Street, the roving bake sale that may turn up on a street near you (most likely if you live in Silver Lake), is back. This Saturday at 10:30 a.m. on Carnation Avenue (Carnation runs between Micheltorena and Maltman avenues; check treatst.blogspot.com for more details). They're calling this one the "Don't Call It a Comeback" bake sale. Past goodies have included madeleines, cherry turnovers, oatmeal cookies, brownies with sprinkles, pralines and Nilla pudding cups.
-- Betty Hallock
Photo credit: Treat Street
 For anyone wondering what to serve at tonight's first and only Biden-Palin VP debate, coverage of which begins at 6 p.m. PST, consider a Baked Alaska. It's a dessert that was funny even before John McCain selected Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. (For really funny, you might want to tune in to SNL this weekend; to see Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, click here and here.)
A Baked Alaska is a hot-cold dessert, a thin sheet of cake topped with ice cream, encased with an insulating layer of meringue, then put in a hot oven for a few minutes or fired with a brulée torch. The meringue keeps the ice cream from melting, which is a pretty neat trick. In many older recipes (ice cream lover Thomas Jefferson gets credit for a version of this dessert), an eggshell of liquor is perched atop the dessert, then flambéed. Think fast-melting Arctic glacier.
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 Ever open the fridge only to feel like you've stumbled upon a science experiment?
If you stopped by the Test Kitchen any time during the last two weeks, you'd find one of our refrigerators stocked with what looked like a bunch of culture samples nestled among the dairy and produce -- except these samples were in martini coupes and glasses, not Petri dishes.
This week's cover story, Soda fountain favorites go uptown by Betty Hallock, features a recipe for Brix@1601 coconut coupe. It's a visually spellbinding dessert: colorful layers of sweet-tart kalamansi (a Southeast Asian citrus) gelee, fresh raspberry marmalade, buttery coconut sables and a quenelle of lime-coconut sorbet are playfully topped with a crisp, delicate coconut meringue.
Maybe not surprisingly, our attempts to adapt this artistic restaurant creation for the home kitchen provided just a few -- albeit tasty -- challenges....
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 The oven. Whether it's a much-loved standard home issue, a powder-blue mid-century restoration or the latest two-ton stainless steel conversation piece, you need an accurate oven to get the job done.
Amy Scattergood's Food section story this week, Bring the bistro experience home with savory rillettes, points up the need for an accurate oven for the long, slow roasting required for meltingly tender lamb rillettes. And for this week's SOS recipe, a rich and moist banana cake needs the right temperature, too. Here are some tips for determining, maintaining and making the most of your oven's accuracy:
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 Ever have a food debate? A group of friends and I had one recently. The topic: cake.
Fittingly, it started over dessert -- a birthday cake -- with an offhand comment from my friend Miranda:
"My favorite cake is coconut. Soon after we started dating, [my boyfriend] Rod and I were walking past these cakes at a store. I spotted an amazing coconut cake, turned to him and said, 'I could stick my face in that for an hour and not come up for air.' "
Then someone else chimed in with their favorite cake: devil's food. Half a second later forks were flying as the cake debate ensued: Which cake rules, and which L.A. bakery reigns supreme?
For Miranda, the best cake bakery was a no-brainer:
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 Today is National Cheesecake Day. I'm not exactly sure how I know this. I first heard about it online and then I got a news release from the Cheesecake Factory that pointed it out. For obvious reasons.
The chain is offering a promotional tie-in: slices of its cheesecake (any flavor or variety, today only) for $1.50, the same price that those slices sold for in 1978 when the Cheesecake Factory first opened in Beverly Hills.
The Cheesecake Factory isn't the only place to find cream-cheesy goodness. Il Carpaccio serves a mean slice of orange-peel-flavored ricotta cheesecake, Melrose Bar & Grill has a light, flavorful option and Osteria Mozza serves one with a trio of honeys. Or you can make your own. The Food section ran a story not so long ago celebrating cheesecake and offering up three decadent recipes, here. Part of the package is a video of Ciro Marino of Marino's on Melrose demonstrating a classic Italian cheesecake with running on-camera commentary provided by his son, chef Sal Marino of Il Grano.
— Jessica Gelt
Photo: Richard Hartog / Los Angeles Times
 What? Apple pie season before July's gone? For amateur backyard growers, it is indeed so. 
Most of us have been steered when planting to the Beverly Hills apple, an early variety that doesn't require low temperatures to thrive. Its fruit is lovely-- pale green and smooth at first, passing through a stippled red-on-yellow stage, and finally-- if the birds don't get there first--to an overall russet red. But after you've had a tree for several seasons, you seldom want to let hanging fruit get beyond the yellow-red stage. The flesh quickly loses its snap.
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The comment from Jonathan Gold about Donna Deane's inspired low-fat baking (see Russ Parsons' tribute post to Donna below) is sure to be greeted with a chorus of "I'll second that motion." So let me be the first to nominate one of the deceptively modest and amazingly delicious, reliable and smart recipes that ran in her longtime column on low-fat cooking. It's in her 1998 cookbook "The Low-Fat Kitchen" with other recipes drawn from that column.
This recipe for low-fat oatmeal cookies isn't a second-best oatmeal cookie. It's a delicious stand-alone cookie concept of its own.
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Plum buckle
Servings: Makes one (9-inch) buckle
Note: From "Bubby's Homemade Pies" by Ron Silver and Jen Bervin. You may substitute one-half cup yogurt and one-half cup milk for the buttermilk.
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups packed dark brown sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 cup buttermilk
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups thickly sliced plums
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly butter a 9-inch cast-iron skillet. In a medium bowl, sift together the flour and baking soda and set aside. With an electric mixer, cream the brown sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Beat in the buttermilk, egg and vanilla until smooth. Scrape down the sides. Add the flour mixture to the bowl while the beater is running. Scrape down and mix briefly, just until combined.
2. Pour the batter into the skillet. Smooth it out — it will be very thick. Pour the plums over the batter and lightly press them down so they are partially submerged. Mix together the cinnamon and sugar and scatter it over the top.
4. Bake the buckle on a lipped baking sheet for 45 to 55 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center reveals a moist crumb with no liquid remaining. Serve warm. Store loosely covered at room temperature for up to three days.
Photo by Betty Hallock
 I'm a little obsessed with cannelés, the pretty little Bordelaise cakes that are so deeply caramelized on the outside that they look burnt, yet have a dense, rich custardy interior. I've hit every bakery in town that has them. On my last trip to Paris, I was at Eric Kayser's Latin Quarter boulangerie when they opened their doors at 7 a.m. —and back again 20 minutes later for another bag. (I still have one of those that made it back from Paris in my freezer. Prototype? Talisman? Maybe both.) But I'd never made cannelés until last week, when a friend (also with a cannelé obsession) brought me back a brick of beeswax (right) from the honey stall at a local farmers market. Beeswax?
 Beeswax, according to Paula Wolfert's cannelé recipe in her cookbook "The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen" is one of the secrets to creating that glossy, dark crust. Melted, combined with safflower oil and brushed in a very fine film onto metal cannelé molds, the "white oil" helps in the caramelization process. So I followed Wolfert's recipe, using the individual metal cannelé molds we had in the Test Kitchen. Copper molds are the best, but they're insanely expensive; the orange silicone molds that look like muffin tins work okay, but, as baker (and blogger) Dorie Greenspan wrote in an e-mail, "The silicone molds are, as the French would say, 'efficaces,' but you can't use beeswax in them and you don't get that dark, dark crust." OK, then. The first batch, baked at 400 degrees for 2 hours (as Wolfert directs), were a little too black. But the second batch, baked for 1 hour and 20 minutes, were perfect (above, left). A glossy burnished exterior; moist, almost like a popover, on the inside. And they were surprisingly easy to make.
If you don't feel like making them (or heading to Paris), there are plenty first-rate cannelés in town, at Cafe Surfas (plain, chocolate and banana), La Brea Bakery, Boule (plain and chocolate), EuroPane and LA Mill. And Sumi Chang and Adrian Vasquez (of EuroPane and LA Mill, respectively) both use beeswax when making their superb cannelés. Are they better that way? You decide — preferably with a demitasse of espresso.
EuroPane, 950 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 577-1828. LA Mill Coffee Boutique, 1636 Silver Lake Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 663-4441.
— Amy Scattergood
Photos by Amy Scattergood
 The July issue of Family Circle just landed in my mailbox, and I think you'll agree that the cover is a showstopper.
Someone went and super-sized the cupcake.
How did they do it? I flipped to Page 154 in the magazine for details and found that there's a giant cupcake pan now on the market. It has two sides. One side is the "bottom" of the cupcake, complete with cute little ridges that look as if they were imparted by a cupcake liner. The other side is the swirly "top." You bake batter in both sides, pop 'em out, put them together and –- voila! -- giant cupcake.
My immediate reaction was, I'm sure, the same as yours: Launch a campaign to nominate this person for culinary sainthood, and have his or her visage carved into Mt. Rushmore.
But as I began fantasizing about a cupcake the size of my head, I began to fret: Doesn't this contraption cut down on the frosting?
To me, cupcakes are simply a delivery system for frosting. And the perfect frosting-to-cupcake ratio is roughly 55% frosting and 45% cupcake. (You think I'm making this up? No. I've really put some thought into this.)
So if the swirly part of the giant cupcake is actually cake ... that means less frosting, no? Has anyone tried one of these? Maybe I am missing something.
I do think the giant cupcake would be a hit at a kid's birthday party. I did a little scouting around on the Internet. It appears there are at least two manufacturers of these pans, and they all sell for about $30. They're at a variety of places, including at Target, Sur La Table and Williams-Sonoma. Family Circle also has instructions for a special deal for $25.99.
In the meantime, here's a link to a recipe for Auntie Em's coconut cupcakes, courtesy of Times Test Kitchen manager Noelle Carter. This one has been a hit with readers, and has been requested again and again. I know it's only June but I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say it has a shot at our our annual Top 10 list. Just remember, you read it here first!
-- Rene Lynch
Photo credit: Cover courtesy of Family Circle magazine.
 Back in January, when I wrote a story on sourdough, I had 18 active starters in my kitchen. Afterwards, I kept most of them, although baker Peter Reinhart told me I was being sentimental and urged I throw many of them out (have a little ceremony, he suggested). I gave some away, but mostly they've been languishing in my refrigerator since then, unfed, dormant, but not forgotten. As it's soon going to be too hot to bake happily, I decided to take out 4 of them and see how they'd fare after 5 months of neglect.  The picture on the left shows them before feeding: Three I made myself, one with Peter Reinhart's pineapple juice recipe, one with Nancy Silverton's grape recipe, a third using Paul Bertolli's potato recipe; the fourth was from Sona's 100 year-old Puglian starter. On Friday morning, I stirred in the 'hootch' and fed each with equal parts water and AP flour; more feedings followed on Friday night, Saturday morning and Saturday night. By Sunday morning, they were all bubbly and very active (right). I baked with the most active of the four (Reinhart's, with Silverton's a very close second). 
Here are the boules, which rose beautifully, had nice hole structure, and tasted nutty and surprisingly mild -- especially considering how long they'd gone without feeding. Which goes to show how resilient starters can be. And why I'll never need to buy yeast again.
-- Amy Scattergood
Photos by Amy Scattergood
Warm weather always brings out the wild side of barbecuers. The website of Cookshack, a manufacturer of electric smokers, has just announced the winners of a contest for nontraditional barbecue: traditional bbq meats smoked in a nontraditional way, nontraditional meats with a novel smoke profile, etc.
Including smoked desserts. Not heavily smoked desserts, mind you. In fact, the winning recipe neglects to mention putting wood chips in the smoker, though you obviously have to throw in a couple. Apple or cherry wood, I'd guess, not hickory or mesquite.
Anyway, that winner was a sort of coconut, chocolate, butterscotch cheesecake cooked in a smoker (partly cooked -- once the flavoring stuff is cooked and smoked, you top it with store-bought cheesecake filling). You can see the recipe here, along with some other unusual uses for a smoker.
-- Charles Perry
In honor of St. Patrick's Day, which is Monday, I got out the Irish cookbooks this morning. Having once spent a lot of time reading James Joyce, my favorite is "The Joyce of Cooking: Food and Drink From James Joyce's Dublin." OK, I know it's St. Patrick's Day, not Bloomsday (June 16, the anniversary of the fictional day described in "Ulysses"), but why not. Any excuse to make Banbury cakes.
At the beginning of the Lestrygonians chapter of "Ulysses" (U 153, Vintage edition), Leopold Bloom buys two Banbury cakes from an old applewoman for a penny, then feeds them to the gulls wheeling over the River Liffey. "Gone. Every morsel ... he shook the powdery crumb from his hands. They never expected that. Manna."
They're very similar to scones, made with the usual ingredients (flour, baking powder, eggs, milk, sugar) plus black currants. Make them into wedges, bake them off, then serve with a cup of strong black tea laced with milk and sugar. I even found an old mug I'd bought at Dublin's Bewley's Cafe, down the street from Trinity College and not so very far from Davy Byrnes pub, where Bloom ate his lunch. He was hungry, having fed his cakes to the birds. I prefer eating mine.
"The Joyce of Cooking," by Alison Armstrong; forward by Anthony Burgess. (Station Hill Press; 1986.)
-- Amy Scattergood
Photo by Amy Scattergood
 Last week at the Grove's Sur La Table store, author and baker Peter Reinhart was in town teaching a bread class. (Here is Reinhart, examining the texture of a student's dough.) Reinhart is on a tour to promote his latest book, "Whole Grain Breads." From L.A. he's traveling to the Bay Area and then to Phoenix for a stop at Chris Bianco's Pizzeria Bianco -- Reinhart has also authored a book on pizzas -- before heading home to Charlotte, N.C. (The day before this class, my colleague Betty Hallock and I had the pleasure of eating pizza with Reinhart at Pizzeria Mozza. It was his first time at Mozza; during the meal, he kept his containers of sourdough starter in the restaurant's refrigerator.)
Reinhart, a longtime baking instructor at Johnson & Wales University, didn't just have his students mix dough. He sent around just-baked samples and bowls of fascinating stuff: whole grain mash in various stages of preparation, crackers made from pumpkin seed flour and agave syrup, spent grain donated from Torrance's Angel City Brewery. The spent grain, a byproduct of beer making, went into perhaps the best bread of the night: a gorgeous, nutty and unbelievably flavorful loaf, which Reinhart had baked earlier in the day, made from a combination of a "biga," a "soaker," a "starter" and a dough, along with about a cup of the brewery grains.
Reinhart had the class make four doughs: the spent grain, a country miche, a whole wheat mash bread and a Vollkornbrot, a type of Old World rye bread. Other than the spent grain bread, the Vollkornbrot got the most attention. The dough -- made from rye starter, a mash of rye meal, malt powder and flax seeds, cocoa powder, molasses, yeast and sunflower seeds -- had the consistency of mud and barely rose at all. But the bread, the color of dark chocolate, dusted with flour and covered with rustic surface cracks, was astonishing.
Reinhart thinks dense German breads are the next bread trend. "We've done French and Italian," he said, referring to the mainstream marketing of baguettes and ciabattas. "I think that's next." Reinhart concluded by having the class feed his two sourdough starters; this baker travels with both starters and a supply of the hard-to-find spent grain, which he checks as luggage.
"Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor" (Ten Speed Press; 2007).
-- Amy Scattergood
Photo by Amy Scattergood
 Tomorrow really is Super Tuesday: Not only is it the date on which primaries or caucuses will be held in 24 states (including the crucial one here in California), but it's also Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), Shrove Tuesday, the last day before Lent.
In England and here in the U.S., many churches mark the day with pancake suppers; it's also a day when people who don't ordinarily make crepes will get out their battered French crepe pans to make the thin French pancakes. As I wrote a year ago in a story about crepes, the tradition was born from kitchen economy: Cooks made pancakes or crepes in order to use up eggs, butter and milk before Lent. 
So when a reader -- who also happens to be a Lutheran minister -- e-mailed me his recipe for sourdough crepes after he'd read my recent sourdough starter story, it seemed perfect timing. Sourdough pancakes are fantastic, but I'd never thought of using starter in crepes. Remembering the buckwheat galettes that are traditional in Brittany, I took my white sourdough starter and fed it with buckwheat flour instead. Over the weekend as it grew and grew, the deep, nutty flavor of the buckwheat deepened; this morning, the starter was thick and alive, the texture of French buttercream.
Pastor Dan Hooper's recipe calls for beating 4 eggs in a bowl, whisking in 1 1/2 cups of active starter, adding 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, then letting the mixture stand for an hour. I used my buckwheat starter, fed the night before with equal parts by weight of organic buckwheat flour and water; I also used fleur de sel for the salt.
While I was waiting for the batter to rest, I whipped up some Chantilly cream laced with lemon peel and apples sautéed until they caramelized (flambéed with Armagnac, finished with lemon juice and a little more fleur de sel).
The crepes were amazing. The starter made the batter a fantastic consistency, creamy and elastic; and the flavor of the sourdough was a perfect match for the buckwheat. Because of this elasticity, the batter also swirled easily, effortlessly, on the crepe pan -- holding together without tearing, even though the batter was quite thin. The edges cooked into lacy filigrees, and the center bubbled up almost immediately -- and this with buckwheat batter, which I've always had more difficulty with than batter made with AP flour.
The crepes were yummy with the apples and cream, or try them with grated Gruyère cheese and thinly sliced ham. Personally, I'm going to cut mine into donkey and elephant shapes for a snack while the returns come in. Well, maybe not: Crepes are already shaped like Os, aren't they?
-- Amy Scattergood
Photos by Amy Scattergood
When I called Maggie Glezer, coauthor of "Artisan Baking Across America," to ask her questions about baking with sourdough, she listened as I recited my proportions and technique, then promptly suggested I skip half of the steps I was following. Ever since reading about Jim Lahey's no-knead method (see Mark Bittman's article in the New York Times, Nov. 8, 2006), Glezer says she's been cutting out more and more steps in her own bread baking. "I wasn't really kneading my challah doughs," Glezer wrote in an e-mail, "but it didn't occur to me to do the same things with hearth breads."
So I tried the recipe for whole wheat sourdough boules without going through the initial mixing, any of the folds or the pre-shape. I got up in the morning, after my sourdough starter was ripe, and just mixed all the ingredients together in a big bowl, covered it all with plastic wrap and let it sit for 2 1/2 hours. Actually, I went back to bed. When I finally did get up, I divided the dough in two, shaped the pieces into two rounds and put them into baskets for another 2 1/2 hours. (Well, I'd forgotten the bannetons and brotforms and proofing baskets at work, so I stuck them into ordinary collanders that I'd lined with floured old linen towels.) Then I baked them off in my oven and took them into work. They were terrific, with good hole structure (although the hole structure is better when you fold the dough) and a fantastic crust. The crumb was moister than the others had been, a little denser and creamier. Bread does taste better when you're not sleep-deprived.
More bread tips (and pictures) after the jump.
-- Amy Scattergood
Photos by Amy Scattergood
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 My daughter Sophie, who is 6 1/2, adores madeleines. (More than pasta or chocolate or even duck confit.) And so last weekend, when she told me that I hadn't made her madeleines for "two whole years," I had a slight panic attack. Store-bought madeleines are not -- all tired Proust references aside -- what I wanted her to remember from childhood. And since she also loves to bake, it was time to get out the madeleine tins. Below right is Soph filling the tins, which I have in two sizes.
 My favorite recipe for the little baked cakes is Alain Giraud's, published here last year as part of our cookie contest. (He came in second, behind Sherry Yard, with his tiny almond-orange madeleines.) But Sophie prefers Paula Wolfert's recipe, from her book "The Cooking of South-West France." Russ Parsons included the recipe in a 2005 profile of Wolfert. (Click on "Read more 'Madeleines for Sophie' " to find it.) For the record, it had not been two years since I baked them for her. Wolfert makes her madeleines with orange flower water and clarified butter. (Easy to make, clarified butter keeps for ages in the refrigerator for moments of crisis like this one.) They're light, floral -- and totally addictive. After eating the first half-dozen, Soph even shared the rest with her sister, who ate hers with (yes), a cup of tea.
This blank space ________________ is for your Proust joke.
"The Cooking of South-West France," by Paula Wolfert (Wiley, 2005).
-- Amy Scattergood
Photos by Robert Lachman (madeleines on plate) and Amy Scattergood
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Pastry chefs have a lot of very cool tricks, and sometimes it's comforting to learn the little ones, the simpler techniques that don't require professional kitchens and obscure cooking tools. Thanks to former Campanile pastry chef Kim Boyce, I've been baking a lot of muffins lately -- and thinking about how Boyce uses whole grains to improve both their flavors and health benefits. So this morning I made the raspberry-chocolate muffins from Alice Medrich's new cookbook, a book I brought home after Betty Hallock gave it great reviews. Whole wheat flour, fresh fruit -- and chocolate's healthy, right? (Especially chunks of 70% Valrhona.) But I'd run out of whole wheat flour. So instead I used unbleached white flour and added a generous dose of wheat germ -- a trick I'd learned from Nancy Silverton, Boyce's former boss. Medrich's muffin recipe is a pretty simple one, but her suggestion for the raspberries was one I'd never tried. Instead of folding fresh raspberries into the batter, which is what you'd expect, she has you freeze the berries first. This incredibly simple trick solves two problems simultaneously: It keeps the juice of the berries from bleeding into the batter, and it also prevents the muffins from getting too mushy when you bake them. So when you add the numbers, the muffins took 5 minutes to mix, 15 minutes to bake, and three pastry chefs to bring them together. Oh, and two people ate six of them in under 10 minutes.
"Pure Dessert" by Alice Medrich (Artisan).
-- Amy Scattergood
Photo by Amy Scattergood
 It may seem like summer vacation is barely over to you, but to your kids, it's already time to put on Halloween costumes and decorate the house. I even heard my younger daughter humming Christmas carols a few days ago. (At least my horror-stricken expression, when they dangled fake spiders in my face, was genuine.) For times like these, an all-purpose sugar cookie recipe can work almost as well as Prozac. A basket full of various cookie cutters helps a lot too. The kids can mix and roll out the dough, then cut it out in seasonally appropriate shapes. We used letter cookie-cutters to spell "Halloween" and a handy wolf-shaped cutter for a werewolf. If you pick up the cutters whenever you find them on sale, you'll have a pile that can work for any ad hoc cookie occasion. (We baked sugar cookies in the shapes of donkeys and elephants for the last election.) Another good idea is to make double the dough and freeze the extra for those holidays that really catch you off guard. Labor Day, say. Or the Imaginary Friend's sudden birthday.
-- Amy Scattergood
Photo by Amy Scattergood
 In one of the weirdest coincidences ever, the Food section's Betty Hallock and I both, unbeknown to each other, did the nuttiest thing ever -- we baked on what felt like the hottest weekend in history. What possessed each of us, independently, to fire up the oven? An elusive little fruit known variously as the French sugar plum, the Italian prune plum and, in French, the quetsche (pronounced kwetch). My first close encounter with the fruit was in the early '90s, when my friend Yves brought a tarte aux quetsches to dinner at my apartment in New York. It was simple, gorgeous and fabulous, and I never forgot it. Every year I mean to run a story about the fruit in Food -- and re-create that marvelous tart -- but the season for the plum is very short, and you never know when they're coming until suddenly you see them in the market. I hadn't yet seen them here, but last week Yves sent a picture of a tarte aux quetsches he had just made, so I was on the lookout.
 Yves is no food professional, though he bakes like one, and he knows quite a bit about food and wine. In France, he tells me, the quetsche comes from the Alsace region. Besides being baked into tarts, they're also eaten raw or made into compotes. "The latter," he writes, "are awesome." (Yves is the only person I know who uses "latter" and "awesome" in the same sentence.) He was nice enough to send me his mother's recipe (which I've adapted; you'll find it after the jump). The secret ingredient is a little Slivovitz (plum brandy) sprinkled over the top before baking. "Actually, the brandy is very optional," writes Yves. "The sugar on top is important, as it helps the fruit render its juice, which then coats the dough nicely."
 Long story long, I stumbled on the plums at my own neighborhood Whole Foods on Saturday, so gleefully picked up three bagfuls. I found a bottle of Serbian Slivovitz at Vicente Foods (8 years old!). I made the pâte sucrée for the crust on Saturday, and Sunday morning, I baked.
This morning, Betty came into the office and told me she did a crazy thing over the weekend -- she baked! What did she bake? Well, a friend had given her some French sugar plums a few days before, she said, and hot as it was, they moved her to turn on the oven too. She baked them into a clafouti.
So they're out there, those inspiring sugar plums or prune plums or whatever you want to call them. Go out and grab 'em while the grabbing's good -- and let's hope the temperature falls tomorrow!
Italian prune plums, $1.79 per pound at select Whole Foods markets. Navip Slivovitz, $25.99 at Vicente Foods, 12027 San Vicente Blvd.; (310) 472-5215.
--Leslie Brenner
Photos by Leslie Brenner, Wylie Peremarti and Betty Hallock
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