It was Maxence’s birthday last week, and one of the things we did to mark the occasion — in addition to one glorious meal at Les Ambassadeurs — was to invite friends to join us and celebrate at a small cocktail bar that recently opened in our neighborhood, on an improbable little street we’d hardly ever noticed before. Maybe it didn’t even exist.

Moist with a fluffy crumb, this cake has a lovely and deep chocolate flavor, delectably tickled by little specks of toasted coconut.

The bar is trendy yet cosy, with a cushy banquette and plenty of stools to sit on, artwork on the walls (of course no one will settle for just being a bar anymore, they have to be a bar-cum-art gallery) and a long mirror to check your makeup in. And just as importantly, the music is soft enough you don’t need lipreading skills to communicate, and the drinks menu features classics and a few bartender specials, at prices that won’t have you file under Chapter 11.

A grand time was had by all, and around midnight, when we had slowly but surely taken over the place, I whipped out the box of coconut chocolate cake I had brought. I learned on previous occasions that attempting to cut a round cake in thirty slices on some small and sticky corner of a bar whilst holding up your end of an animated conversation, is tricky at best. And contrary to popular belief, the Champagne really doesn’t help. So this time, I baked the cake in a square pan and cut it in small servings just before we left: all I had to do then was pass the box around for everyone to take a piece.

This cake is a variation on the Gâteau au Chocolat Aérien, using less sugar, substituting fromage blanc (or plain yogurt) for some of the butter, and coconut flakes for part of the flour. Moist with a fluffy crumb, it has a lovely and light chocolate flavor, delectably tickled by the little specks of toasted coconut.

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[Dry-Cured Duck Sausage]

We had long wanted to try Le Petit Canard, a small restaurant tucked away in a side street of the 9th arrondissement, just a few blocks from us. I had often walked past it on my way up and down the hill, and it looked cosy and warm, with just a handful of candle-lit tables. As the name implies, the menu focuses on all things duck, and I have a weakness for monomaniac restaurants.

We finally made it there last week with our neighbors and my two oldest girlfriends. For starters, we decided to share a selection of duck charcuterie: smoked magret, duck rillettes (a pâté of shredded meat), two kinds of duck terrines (one with port and green peppercorns, one with chesnuts), and slices of duck saucisson, a dry-cured sausage that’s classically made with just pork meat.

All the products served at this restaurant come from a small farm in Haute-Savoie, a region in the French Alps. This came as something of a quirky suprise, because Haute-Savoie isn’t typically renowned for its duck breeding — the bulk of French duck products comes from the South-West. The owner confirmed that this farm, operated by his brother-in-law in a village called Balaison, is the only such farm in the area, but that the ducks fare very well in the cool mountain air. They enjoy the ski slopes, too.

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[Chocolate Pillow from Lyon]

Like many French kids, I practically learned how to read with bande dessinées, the Belgian/French take on comic books, and a large chunk of my general culture comes directly from them. Although I had too many favorites to name just one, the classic Astérix was certainly among them. It is one of those incredibly multi-layered bande dessinées that you can read at any age, filled as they are with puns, references and witty anachronisms. Some of them may escape you as a child, but they’ll suddenly click when you’re older and all of a sudden you understand why secret agent Acidechloridrix goes by the code name of HCl.

In a 1965 album called Le Tour de Gaule (“Asterix and the Banquet” in the English version), Astérix and Obélix take a trip around Gaul to show Julius Caesar that they are quite free to go as they please despite the palisade that the Romans have just built around their village. And to prove how far they’ve managed to travel, they bring back a food specialty from each of the cities they visit, and share the bounty with the Romans at the end of the story, adding their own local treat: the chestnut — châtaigne is also French slang for a punch in the face.

This was one of my favorite Astérix adventures, and I am determined to retrace his steps one day — tour operators of the world, there’s an idea for you. But once in Lugdunum (i.e. the city of Lyon) I wouldn’t stop at just sausages and quenelles like he did: I would also purchase a sizeable amount of Coussins Lyonnais, as pictured above.

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I cultivate a relationship of deep trust and mutual appreciation with the Fruit Crumble Family. We send each other holiday cards and such, we remember our respective birthdays, and I often turn to them when I’m looking for a simple dessert that won’t keep me busy for half the day, one that will be comforting and reliably tasty. And if it can suffuse the kitchen and living-room with warm golden smells, so much the better.

It’s not the kind of dessert that makes your friends go, “Wow!”; it is the kind of dessert that makes your friend go, “Mmmm!“, and that’s really all that matters to me.

My mother makes a killer apple crumble, she really does. Often dolled up with blackberries, hand-picked and frozen in the early fall, it is always served with home-made crème anglaise in an ageless glass jug, which we unabashedly lick to the last drop once all traces of the crumble have disappeared.

I like to play around with my mother’s recipe, substituting and twisting until the crumble’s head turns.

Her recipe — one of the first I copied in my recipe book years ago — is incredibly simple, calling for equal weights of butter, sugar, flour and breadcrumbs, plus a dash of milk. But try as I might to follow it with exactitude and punctilious precision (and no, I won’t allow you to doubt this assertion), it never comes out quite the same.

So instead of trying to replicate my mother’s crumbles, I just keep my fingers crossed when I go to my parents’ for dinner, hoping that’s what she’ll make. (Then again if it’s a charlotte or a tart or a crème renversée I certainly don’t complain.)

And in my own kitchen, I like to play around with her recipe, substituting and twisting until the crumble’s head turns. In this version I used salted butter and unrefined sugar (as in all my baking), oatmeal in place of breadcrumbs for a crunchier topping, almond powder instead of flour for a subtle nutty taste, and a couple of ripe mangoes, teasing the apples with their smooth flamboyant flesh and suave exoticism.

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