Boudin Blanc, Deux Pommes en Purée

Boudin blanc is a soft sausage, made with white meat (usually chicken or veal) enriched with pork or veal fat, cream, eggs, flour and mie de pain (the inside of a bread loaf), finely mixed and well seasoned.

It is traditionally a Christmas dish, but in Paris you can find it in charcuteries year round — to my greatest satisfaction, as it is one of my all-time favorite comfort foods. It has a very mild taste, a little sweet and a little peppery, and a soft texture underneath the thin casing, making it a sure kid pleaser.

The other day, while out food shopping, Maxence and I stepped into a small charcuterie on rue Lepic, in which we had never been before. It turned out to have a really appetizing selection of pâtés and sausages and traditional prepared dishes.

Among these, their Boudin Blanc Truffé aux Noisettes caught my eye, a variation on boudin blanc that included truffles and hazelnuts. Sunday lunch menu: check!

I prepared the boudin blanc with its typical buddies: mashed potatoes and mashed apples. The potatoes were cooked according to my recipe for Perfect Mashed Potatoes, except I used whipping cream in place of the milk because that’s what I had on hand. For the mashed apples, you’ll find the recipe (hardly a recipe, really) below. As for the sausages, they were simply seared in a skillet with a little butter: they are already cooked, so they only need a little reheating and coloring.

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[Coconut and White Chocolate Cake]

As you know, yesterday was Maxence’s birthday : I treated him to a nice dinner out on Friday (review on the way), and we celebrated again yesterday night with a group of friends, in a bar just a block from our apartment – which we more or less took over. This bar is a small place and we were on friendly terms with the owners, so I had decided to bake a cake and share it with our friends there. And since coconut and white chocolate are two of Maxence’s favorite things, I twisted my favorite coffeecake recipe yet again to make a version around this combo, with flaked coconut in the batter, and a white chocolate and coconut frosting.

The birthday cake ceremony was duly held, with the lights off and the song and the clapping and the candles and the blow-them-out-in-one-breath challenge (successfully met). We served the cake on the paper plates we had brought, and I was showered with compliments about it, much to my glee. The cake, as pleasantly moist as ever, has a great coconut flavor and the frosting works really well, making it sweet and rich but not overly so.

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[New Year Jam]

Just a couple of days ago, I happened to be around La Grande Epicerie de Paris, the quite huge gourmet food store attendant to the store Le Bon Marché. This kind of place works like a magnet on me, and although I was laden with different heavy items to carry, I still went in to browse around. This is really heaven for food lovers, but I didn’t stay long : there is only so much cumbersome aisle space negociation even I can take, as filled with tempting things as said aisles may be.

I did, however, have time to pick up the cutest jar of jam in history, with its little red polka dot hat and white knot. Christine Ferber is known as “la fée des confitures”, the jam fairy. I have mentioned her before, and how she makes fruit jams the old-fashioned way, in her little Alsacian village of Niedermorschwihr (pronounced whichever way suits your fancy). I have bought a couple of jars of her creations in the past, one Nougabricot (Apricot jam with honey and bits of almonds and pistachios) and one Framboise-Chocolat (Raspberries and Valrhona Guanaja chocolate). Both were memorably succulent.

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[Chocolate and Candied Chestnuts Coffee Cake]

I wanted to bake a cake for our new year’s eve party – what’s a party without a cake? — and this is what I made. The recipe for this cake is originally a Sour Cream Coffee Cake from Bon Appétit (circa 1993), which my mother and I tinkered with a little while ago, lowering the sugar content, subbing yogurt for sour cream and converting the measurements from cups to grams.

My mother and I absolutely loved it, so perfectly crispy and caramelized and moist and flavorful. The original cake has a walnut and cinnamon topping, and I had made a delicious hazelnut and blueberry version for my birthday party last summer. A funny thing to note is that coffee cakes are not common at all in France, so when I tell people what this cake is, they always get a quizzical look on their faces, wondering why they can’t taste the coffee. So I have to explain that coffee cake is a cake to eat with coffee, not a cake containing coffee.

I wanted to try twisting it again, using more festive ingredients this time, chocolate chips and chunks of marrons glacés, those delicious glazed sweet chestnuts which are a typical holiday treat in France. I modified the recipe to account for the sweeter nature of my toppings, and avoid having my guests fall into sugar shock.

For the chocolate chips, I used the ganache drops I bought at G. Detou before the holidays, which characteristically came in a one-kilo bag. The candied chestnut pieces were generously donated by Maxence from his personal Christmas loot.

The resulting cake was as good as I had hoped. The little bits sunk to the bottom somewhat, which made for a scrumptious bottom layer. It is just the right sweetness, the tastes of chocolate and chestnut present but subtle, complementing the batter’s taste but not overpowering it in the least. And the texture is so pleasant that Maxence commented it was “comme un canelé, mais en gâteau”, which is really the best compliment he can make, considering how much he loves canelés. We served it along with a deliciously fresh fruit salad, a signature Marie-Laure concoction.

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