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Puddings and Desserts

Appears in
Modern Classics
Modern Classics

By Frances Bissell

Published 2000

  • About
If I were seriously rich and had a large kitchen, I sometimes think I would like to employ a pâtissier. Their skill and art, which I know I could never emulate, always fill me with admiration. Over the years, I have had the good fortune to work with many gifted pastry chefs, both here and abroad. And each time I work with them on my recipes, my desserts invariably emerge much improved, and with more elegance and refinement.

Chocolate Jonathan was never as good as when made with Ah Kit at the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong. At the Intercontinental in London, when I first cooked there in 1987, Ernst Bachmann was the pâtissier, and sceptical though he was about my lavender sorbets and custards, he also showed me many techniques for improving my dessert one was to thickly butter a cake tin and line it with flaked almonds before spooning in the sponge mixture; this was one that he rather frowned upon, I seem to remember, since it was a non-fat, low-sugar, wholemeal flour sponge, about as far removed as possible from the sumptuous, elegant confections which emerged from his kitchen.

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