There will be a special place in my baker’s heart for the first project I undertook post-baby, and I take it as a fine omen that it is also an exceptionally good cake, one I have already baked again twice since then.

Our son (it still feels surreal typing these words) is now six weeks old, he is thriving, and although the first weeks were challenging in ways I had been told about but couldn’t truly penetrate until I experienced them firsthand, our little family is finding its rhythm and every day brings new reasons to feel lucky that we landed this particular charming baby.

We have had friends and family come over to meet Milan, and it is on one of these occasions that, feeling uncannily energetic after a night during which the little guy only woke us up every three hours — consider our drastically lowered sleep standards — I decided to bake a cake for our guests.

The recipe is drawn (and marginally adapted*) from a fun new book by Julie Andrieu, a French cook, food writer, and television personality who gathered dessert recipes that use vegetables.

Her carrot cake is among the more classic items in this collection, but it is the one I was drawn to the most: one, because I have to steer clear of dairy for breastfeeding reasons, and this cake uses oil as the source of fat; two, the ingredients list and process were simple enough for my circumstances and I only needed to buy the carrots; and three, I adore carrot cakes but had yet to adopt a particular recipe as a standard in my repertoire.

On the eve of baking day I measured out the ingredients and grated the carrots, and on the day of I assembled the batter and plopped the cake into the oven, all with the baby sleeping against me in his wrap — an absolute godsend if you’re the kind of person who likes to use both of your hands every once in a while.

It was a truly wonderful cake: moist and flavorsome and lightly nubby from the use of cornmeal, with a thin crust on top and the meaty crunch of pecans punctuating every bite, we ate it with an enthusiasm that nearly matched that with which we discussed the important matter of whose eyes and whose nose and whose mouth the baby seems to have taken (the consensus, respectively: mine, Maxence’s, as yet undetermined).

* Here are the elements I modified from the original version: I lowered the amount of sugar a bit, and the amount of spices as well (I prefer a gently spiced carrot cake); I doubled the amount of cornmeal and added salt; I skipped the diced candied orange rind; I used pecans in place of walnuts ; I changed the order in which the ingredients are combined to follow the simple rule of wet ingredients vs. dry ingredients.

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Maxence and I are extraordinarily happy to announce that we are now the proud parents of a little boy named Milan, born in Paris a week ago.

Everything went smoothly, the three of us are doing splendidly, and so far Milan is proving to be a very sweet, easy baby: a good sleeper, a good eater, and an all-around adorable little person if you ask us.

Still, things will likely be a bit more quiet around here as we get the rest we need, adjust to this new chapter of our lives, and I learn to type with just one hand.

In the meantime, be well, eat well, and I’ll talk to you soon!

Patte de loup — literally, wolf’s paw — is the name of an heirloom variety of apple that is chiefly grown in the Northwest of France, and is mentioned in horticultural documents as early as the Middle Age.

Small and oddly shapen, with a rugged, brownish yellow skin that often cracks and scars as if a wolf had clawed it, it is typically the kind of apple that did not stand a chance in the modern battle for glossy and perfectly calibrated specimens.

And yet the patte de loup is very close to apple perfection in my book: sweet and tart, with a firm flesh that is juicy but not too crisp, it does equally well eaten au couteau, i.e. sliced with a knife and munched on out of hand, or baked into a tarte tatin or an apple cake.

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We were expecting friends for brunch on Saturday morning, and I decided to bake scones. Not the triangular wedges stuffed with various ingredients often sold in the US, but the classic, round, plain, British kind.

For three years, almost to the day, I’d been sitting on a recipe that my dear friend Chika had shared with me, and which she’d drawn from Anton Edelmann’s out-of-print book, Taking Tea at the Savoy. She had mentioned that this was her go-to scone recipe, and it was the one I intended to try, for a change from my usual yogurt scones.

The dough was quick and easy to assemble — a definite plus for a brunch item — and I rolled it out, according to the instructions, to a thickness of 1.5 cm (2/3 inch). Had I been more fully awake, I would probably have realized that this was a bit thin, and that there was little chance that these would puff up to the kind of height one expects from a scone.

For three years I’d been sitting on a recipe that my dear friend Chika had shared with me, calling it her go-to scone recipe.

Into the oven they went, with a touch of salt and sugar sprinkled across the top, and indeed, while the smell was heavenly and the baking time just right, my scones didn’t quite look like scones.

Of course I served them anyway, with strawberries from Carpentras (hulled and halved an hour or two in advance and macerated with just a little sugar to bring out their juices and concentrate their flavor) and raw milk crème fraîche from the cheese shop — a sort of strawberry shortcake* if you will.

And my not-quite-scones were delicious, flaky and tender and not too sweet, but I refrained from calling them anything, not wanting to linger on the fact that this wasn’t quite the format I’d had in mind.

It’s only a few hours later, after a good nap, that the following lightbulb went on in my brain: just like people make muffin tops using special pans, I had simply baked scone tops, which had the bonus advantage of fitting into the toaster easily for reheating, without slicing them in two and in so doing shedding crumbs at the bottom of the toaster.

Suddenly, I felt a lot better about the whole experience.

So, I’ll let you decide to what thickness you choose to roll out the dough for these — I’m giving you two suggestions in the recipe below — but I hope you’ll give them a try one way or the other: it really is a wonderfully simple and good recipe.

Do you have a go-to scone recipe of your own? And have you ever had a similar conundrum with some concoction of yours, which didn’t quite feel like a success until you found just the right name for it?

* Did you know that the French version of that character is called Charlotte aux fraises?

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