In the beginning of the bakery, in 1981, I would have never considered making bread pudding.This is nonsense really because thrifty housewives in France have been making "pain perdu" (meaning lost or day old bread), a cross between french toast and bread pudding for years. I had the imprint of those shimmering pastiserries in my head and I hadn't seen any bread pudding or pain perdu in them. It wasn't to be on the menu! In the nineties, thankfully, comfort food became popular and our restaurants and bakeries started filling up with the wonderful American style desserts of bread pudding, rice pudding, apple pies, cupcakes, and tall chocolate fudge cakes. I have come to realize that I admire the precision and display of French pastries but in the depths of my heart rests the love of homey American country desserts. It is the marriage of these two dessert cultures that I have ended up putting in the cases at Kelly's. I know that our name boasts "French" , but that is a global French now, the merging of the two lands.

In an effort to bridge the culture going from America back to France I sent the bran muffin recipe to the chef I worked for in Paris. He had told me that muffins were becoming popular there. I had to send him some muffin tins as well, but that was some years back and they are probably available in France now. I don't think that I have lost my love France's food or culture, I am not a francophile perdu, no I am a an globalphile now, it feels right.

Bread Pudding

• 1 loaf of Kelly’s challah, or 7 cups challah pieces
• 3 ¼ oz butter
• 1 cups sugar
• 6 eggs
• 3 cups milk
• 1 TB vanilla
• 1Tb orange zest
• 1 TB cinnamon sugar

Take the crust off the challah and cut into squares, place in a pie pan
Milk butter and pour over the challah squares and toss to coat
Mix the sugar, eggs, milk vanilla ,and orange zest to form a liquid custard base
Pour over the challah squares, let rest unbaked for 15 minutes, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar
In a bain marie (a pan larger than the pie pan that is filled with water half way up the outside of the pie pan) bake at 350 for 1 hour and twenty minutes.

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In the beginning of the bakery, in 1981, I would have never considered making bread pudding.This is nonsense really because thrifty housewives in France have been making "pain perdu" (meaning lost or day old bread), a cross between french toast and bread pudding for years. I had the imprint of those shimmering pastiserries in my head and I hadn't seen any bread pudding or pain perdu in them. It wasn't to be on the menu! In the nineties, thankfully, comfort food became popular and our restaurants and bakeries started filling up with the wonderful American style desserts of bread pudding, rice pudding, apple pies, cupcakes, and tall chocolate fudge cakes. I have come to realize that I admire the precision and display of French pastries but in the depths of my heart rests the love of homey American country desserts. It is the marriage of these two dessert cultures that I have ended up putting in the cases at Kelly's. I know that our name boasts "French" , but that is a global French now, the merging of the two lands.

In an effort to bridge the culture going from America back to France I sent the bran muffin recipe to the chef I worked for in Paris. He had told me that muffins were becoming popular there. I had to send him some muffin tins as well, but that was some years back and they are probably available in France now. I don't think that I have lost my love France's food or culture, I am not a francophile perdu, no I am a an globalphile now, it feels right.

Bread Pudding

• 1 loaf of Kelly’s challah, or 7 cups challah pieces
• 3 ¼ oz butter
• 1 cups sugar
• 6 eggs
• 3 cups milk
• 1 TB vanilla
• 1Tb orange zest
• 1 TB cinnamon sugar

Take the crust off the challah and cut into squares, place in a pie pan
Milk butter and pour over the challah squares and toss to coat
Mix the sugar, eggs, milk vanilla ,and orange zest to form a liquid custard base
Pour over the challah squares, let rest unbaked for 15 minutes, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar
In a bain marie (a pan larger than the pie pan that is filled with water half way up the outside of the pie pan) bake at 350 for 1 hour and twenty minutes.

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I’ve gotten into checking my email a lot. I don’t know what has changed in my mind, but the need to see if anyone or any entity is interested in telling me something or contacting me has become a bit of an obsession. I like all the chatter. On a friends recommendation I opened a Facebook page last year only to fall asleep reading my own wall, as well as those of “my friends”. Of course they were the ones I had “confirmed”. It was when I watched the YouTube video of Idiotsofants spoof of Facebook that I really knew that I was sharing the same apprehensions that others were having about it. Here is the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlSkU0TFLs

I wanted so much to love Facebook. I thought it would somehow connect with all my long lost friends and share funny and reflective moments. It wasn’t like that at all. I just swam through the daily ramblings of people I barley knew. Their dull comings and goings that were of no interest even to the authors.

Of course I have been plugging away at my blog. Adding recipes and stories here and there. I don’t know if anyone even reads them. I attack them like an assignment that I am compelled to complete, but I may be the only one reading them. I asked my Mom to read the one about her coffeecake that I felt I so lovingly wrote. I don’t think she read it, or she never commented anyway. The writing is cathartic because I can write anything I want. I can write about my stupid past or my pleasant present. My enjoyable vacations or my struggles with an adolescent. It is all interesting to me, and being one of the only readers, it is fulfilling.

Then I discovered Twitter. I do not know why this appealed to me so much. It isn’t the kind of thing that I follow. I don’t follow anyone’s Twitter because I have a hard time finding what to follow. I tried to follow a pastry cart in San Francisco once and wondered why it was called a Pho Cart. My thirteen year old set me straight that I was following a Pho Soup Cart in Los Angeles. It speaks to the confusion of Twitter that I never realized what they were selling or where they were selling it. I think I had read about this pastry cart that moved around in San Francisco and in an effort to stay under the radar of the business permit process. They let their patrons know where they are by Tweeting the location. I still don’t know how I ended up with the Pho Cart.

I wanted to talk to everyone. So I opened a Twitter account. I called it scfoodandpastry. I should have called it kellysfrenchbakery, but that was too long for Twitter, and kellysbakery was already taken. I have been tweeting. I tweet about specials or what I am going to bake over the weekend. My good friend, who would have come into have lunch anyway, bought the sandwich that I tweeted about. It was a good start. As much as I wanted to talk to everyone through Tweeter, I only have sixteen followers. It is a slow start, but better than zero. I sent a email to my Mom about my twitter account. She called me on the land line and said, “I am not doing that, I don’t even know what it is!” I guess this is okay, she lives far away and won’t make it in for the goat cheese, arugula, and fig sandwich anyway.

Each day I write about something on Twitter. Recently I’ve started writing about contacting me. I guess I want to know it anyone is reading any of this. I won’t stop writing or tweeting, even if you aren’t. It just would be nice to know.

kelly@kellysfrenchbakery.com

scfoodandpastry Twitter

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Ingredients:

For the Cupcake Batter:

• 7 ¾ ounces all-purpose flour
• 2 TB cocoa
• ½+1/8 teas baking soda (sifted)
• ½+1/8 teas salt
• ¾ cup vegetable oil
• 6 ½ oz sugar
• 2/3 cup
• 2 eggs
• 1 ¾ teas red food coloring
• 1 ¼ teas cider vinegar
• 1 TB vanilla

Frosting

• 6 oz salted butter
• 6 cups sifted powdered sugar
• 1/4 cup water
• 1Tb vanilla

Prep.:
Preheat oven 350 degrees F.

Sift together flour, baking soda, salt, and into a bowl and set aside.
In a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, mix oil, sugar, and buttermilk until combined. Add eggs, food coloring vinegar, vanilla and mix well. Add the dry ingredients a little bit at a time and mix on low, scraping down sides occasionally, and mix until just combined. Be sure not to over mix, or the batter will come out tough.

Line a 12-cup cupcake pan with paper liners, scoop the batter into the liners and bake at 350 degrees F for 20 to 30 minutes or until the toothpick comes out clean. Let cool.

For the buttercream frosting:

Whip the butter with a paddle attachment until creamed. Gradually add powdered sugar to the mixture and scrape down the bowl as needed. Add the vanilla and mix until combined.

The frosting can be used right away, or stored in the refrigerator up to a week.
Frost cooled cupcakes with the frosting

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