Apples...

There are a thousand varieties of apples from all over the world. Different shapes, colors, tastes, textures, sugar contents. An apple is probably the first food we ever taste in our life. Some varieties are great for baking and cooking. Others are great to eat just like that: bite by bite. Apples are full of pectin and fiber. Two thirds of the fiber and antioxidants are found in the peel. Did you know that an apple tree takes four to five years to produce their first fruit?  

When I think of apples, I always remember my Grandma. She had the most amazing and delicious apple jello. The original was taken form a newspaper article. Then she transformed it, actually, she enriched it. She never wrote down her recipe so, needless to say, it was lost when she died. The only thing that I remember is that she used yellow apples and a box of green apple commercial jello (it had to be green!), some sugar and water. She never used measuring cups or scale, but the result was always the same. That is a flavor that I really miss from my childhood, and even though I have it in my memory, I cannot recreate it exactly as I remember it was. In my search for flavor, one of the things I learned from her is that you can take any good recipe and make it great.

...a day in Paris

I was supposed to go back home after a one week trip to Spain with my mother. My schedule: Barcelona-Madrid, Madrid-Paris, Paris-Dallas, Dallas-Mexico City. That is the perfect recipe for loosing one of your flights when one of the airports has problems with rain and clouds...and that is exactly what happened: I lost my connection to Dallas and had to spend one day in Paris, all by myself.

My first reaction was panic. But once I had a hotel and a flight reservation for the next day, I realized that it was a day to enjoy. First stop, La Saint Chapell, the most exquisite place in Paris. The first time I went there, I was only 15 and fell in love with the beauty and the silence. Needless to say, I had a lot to think about, some decisions postponed for a while, and being all alone with myself was the perfect time to address them. Inside my head was the idea to change my career, to change the stilettos for clogs, the office for a kitchen, the fancy outfits for an apron. I spent more than an hour there, talking to myself. Then I went to a café to write, to think, to drink an espresso, to eat a croissant. I walked and arrived to Notre Dame and sat there for a while, then walked and walked....another café, the river, window shopping, until my decision was taken in the middle of a bridge facing the Eiffel tower: I wanted to change economics to become a chef.

It all began when...

I was trained as a pastry chef. I enrolled in a culinary school ten years ago with the idea of becoming a chef, a culinary chef. To be accepted I was required to have a one-week pastry class. I was not very happy about it, because I had never baked a cake, or a bread. Only some cookies with one of my grandmas. I was so wrong. Since the first five minutes of that class, I was hooked. I had never studied food chemistry, or even heard about it, and I was being exposed to a fantastic field. Not only that, my cakes and tarts were very good! I was the best student that week. So, needless to say, I was challenged with a decision: culinary or pastry?

I traveled to France a week later, promised to the culinary school dean I would consider pastry, but asked her to wait until I came back. In France, I was introduced to the most fantastic food, pastries, candies, bonbons, patisseries, restaurants, boulangeries, bistros... But it was the moment I found Fauchon patisserie when I had my answer. The macarons, the bonbons, the pate de fruit, the tarts, the jams, the entremets, the sugar work, the ecleirs, the pain au chocolat, the bread. My decision was taken.

But even before that, the story begins seven months earlier during another visit to Paris, this one not planned at all.