When Maxence and I lived in California at the turn of the century, we liked to visit a small shop in Mountain View called Hong Kong Bakery. The Chinese-style pastries all seemed very exotic to me and we ate our way through the full range over the first few months, but soon stopped when we found our gold-medalled champion: the chiffon cake.

If you’ve never had chiffon cake, perhaps you can start by imagining what it might feel like to eat a cloud — a fluffy, moderately sweet, and lightly eggy cloud that would deflate in your mouth with a moist sigh. It is not unlike angel food cake, if you think about it, except that the chiffon cake is not shy about egg yolks; it offers hence a richer mouthfeel, and does not threaten to block your airways.

If you’ve never had chiffon cake, you can start by imagining what it might feel like to eat a cloud — a fluffy, moderately sweet, and lightly eggy cloud that would deflate in your mouth with a moist sigh.

The classic chiffon cake is baked in an ungreased, not nonstick tube pan, in which such batters rise higher because they have more walls to climb. In Chinese bakeries, however, chiffon cake appears under the much more appealing guise of a paper-wrapped cake — a single-serving confection baked in a tall metal tumbler lined with a thin sheet of paper.

Naturally, this allows the lady behind the counter to unmold the cakes easily and two at a time, in symmetric flips of the wrists. But, more to the point, you get to peel the paper off the body of the cake as you eat — one of the more thrilling of earthly sensations, akin to the removal of the plastic sheet that protects the screen of a new cell phone.

I don’t own a tube pan (there is no such thing in the galaxy of French pans; the closest relative is the savarin mold, but it’s really a third cousin twice removed), nor a set of tall metal tumblers, but I had long ago read, on my friend Chika‘s blog, that chiffon cake could be baked in unwaxed paper cups.

Chika had then been kind enough to translate her recipe, which she herself had obtained from a Japanese site, and I finally — after, oh, a good four years — got around to trying it earlier this summer.

My chiffon cakes rose nicely (although, unlike Chika’s, they did not form a dome) and developed a delicate top crust, in welcome contrast to the sponge-like crumb. We enjoyed them so, and found them to be such ideal summer treats, that I am planning to bake an encore batch as soon as I get my kitchen back (believe it or not, our renovations are still not done), but this time I will line the paper cups with parchment paper — it seems less wasteful to at least reuse the cups, and did I mention how much I love stripper cakes?

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I blame it all on my nephew.

Around the time that he was born, earlier this year, something clicked and I decided to take the whole sustainable seafood thing seriously: if he and his unborn cousins are to enjoy a long life full of lobster tails and skate wings, it is up to me to make informed and responsible choices now.

I had heard of the depletion of the oceans before, but I don’t think I had quite realized how dire the situation is: fish populations the world over are threatened by overfishing, overconsumption, pollution, and fishing techniques that wreak havoc in local ecosystems. If we don’t change our ways fast, major fish species may become extinct as early as 2050.

Like all environmental problems, this is an abysmally complex one, with multitudinous causes, implications, side effects, and collateral damages. And if you factor in other, equally pressing concerns, such as levels of mercury, PCB, and other contaminants, as well as the need to favor locally sourced ingredients, it all becomes rather overwhelming, befuddling, discouraging, check all that apply. Not everyone aspires to become an expert in marine matters, and not everyone has the time or inclination to decode what the experts are saying.

We just want to eat fish and be merry.

It is perhaps tempting then to sit on one’s hands and say, well, I’m just the one consumer, I can’t change the world, and that slab of red tuna on the fish stall or on the menu is already out of the water anyway, so I might as well eat it.

But no; it is best to let that slab of red tuna sit there, uneaten, for it is very much a chicken-or-egg (or rather, a fish-or-roe) matter. As much as we would want them to, restaurants and fish markets aren’t in the business of saving the planet; they’re in the business of making their customers happy.

And if what makes you happy is to feel sure that the fish you buy has been fished or farmed sustainably — that is to say, in a way that ensures that the fish population will be maintained or increased, and that the ecosystem it belongs to is protected — then it will become financially profitable for fish vendors and restaurateurs to care.

So, what to do, what to do?

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This has been the strangest July ever. Maxence and I are having our bathroom renovated, and it is far more disruptive than I had — perhaps naively — imagined it would be. The dust, debris, and general lack of showering implement have made our apartment rather inhospitable, and my poor little kitchen is all tarped up, to protect her (of course it’s a she) from the ambient grime.

As you might infer, there has been little cooking going on around here lately — rubble cake, anyone? — but, by a stroke of involuntary foresight, just before the workers came in to bash the walls, I had prepared the ideal antidote: a simple lemon kefir ice cream, made with fermented milk.

It is, without a doubt, the best lemon ice cream I’ve ever tasted.

The culinary fairy behind this recipe is my good friend Estérelle, who writes for ELLE and has a truly staggering knowledge of all things food and cosmetics. In the original version posted on her blog, she makes it with lait ribot, a fermented milk from Brittany. I *heart* lait ribot, but I have difficulty finding it in my neighborhood, so I used kefir instead; it is readily available in the fresh milk aisle of my grocery store.

The acidulated creaminess of the fermented milk is a rare complement to the acidity of the lemon, and the result is a snow-like, tangy concoction that works wonders on one’s dust-parched throat and construction-weary soul.

It is, without a doubt, the best lemon ice cream I’ve ever tasted.

The recipe can be easily adapted to use other types of fermented milk and sweeteners, and even other kinds of citrus. Lime would be perfect (with a splash of rum or cachaça rather than limoncello), as would orange, grapefruit, and, if you want to dazzle your friends with your culinary exotica, yuzu or cumbava.

But I must say that, like Estérelle herself, I am so smitten with this lemon kefir ice cream that I’m unlikely to try it any other way.

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I recently told someone that I was totally over my phase of buying kitchen stuff all the time. With a straight face, I explained that I was content with my current equipment, and that I needed nothing more, really.

I’m afraid this is true in a distorted version of reality that exists only in my head.

I can delude myself all I want, but the fact remains that, over the past three months, I have acquired a little more than zero utensils. I will readily provide a set of indisputable reasons for buying each and every one of them, but still: a flour sifter, a frosting spatula, a set of madeleine molds (one that fits in my small oven), a bulb baster, a new piping bag with metal tips, a sesame mill, and now this.

This, for those of you who are not wholly acquainted with the perfect little baker’s paraphernalia, this is a dough whisk, designed to succeed where the wire whisk and the wooden spoon fail.

This, for those of you who are not wholly acquainted with the perfect little baker’s paraphernalia, this is a dough whisk, designed to succeed where the wire whisk and the wooden spoon fail.

I was completely unaware that the gods of baking had created such a utensil until I visited Portland last spring, for the release of my Paris book: I was to appear briefly on local television, to demo the recipe for chouquettes. I did no such thing, of course, since cooking on a set usually consists in pointing at various items placed on a counter, while talking the host through the recipe.

Local authors might prepare and bring in their own food, but since I was about 5,000 miles from my own kitchen, it is really Sandra, my media escort* and food stylist extraordinaire, who had prepared the choux pastry and the finished chouquettes for me. (And perhaps we can all remember, next time we watch a cooking segment on television, to mentally acknowledge the work done behind the scenes by food stylists.)

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