Daniel Nayeri is a writer and children's book editor in NYC. He loves pastry chefing and Street Fighter 2, hates the word "foodie," and was once an award-winning stuntman.
So vast was my fanboy admiration of Billy Collins when I was in college, so unencumbered by facts my ambition, and so shameless my neophytic insolence, that I wrote the Poet Laureate of United States a poem.
So the story goes, anyway, that when Enric Bernat, Spaniard and former employee of an apple jam factory, piped himself down on a barstool in Barcelona, it was the artist Salvador Dali who was sitting next to him. And it was also 1969.
So what are we talking here, like, four months till Valentine’s Day? Worst holiday of the year for pastry chefs.
So you might be thinking to yourself, “didn’t he do caramel last time?” and you’d be right, gentle reader, quite right.
Demonstrably irrefusable. Ontologically delicious . . . caramelizing something is pretty much the phrase for making it taste good.
Pastry is that second of forgetting. It’s the short counterpoint to the rest of an all-in-all pretty awful day. It’s the unapologetic wasteful misuse of all your resources, a slap in the face of the daily grind.