Hey, my name is Hussein. Welcome to my little blog.

I grew up in Jaffa. Now I live in Jerusalem. I spend most of my days behind a messy desk in an underground pharmacy deprived of sunlight, just like the Batcave. While Batman fights villains who are probably on antipsychotics, I’m the pharmacist who supplies them with the pills.

Between customers and filling prescriptions, I spend my time plotting my next cake. At the end of the day, I emerge to the fresh Jerusalem air and rush back home to the kitchen to chat with my ingredients. “Hello there flour, hello to you too sugar. I’ve been thinking about you. Let’s see what comes out of you today.”

I discovered the world of baking through my love of fondant. After a few years of baking for my family’s and friends’ birthdays, I enrolled in pastry school at the Israeli Institute of Culinary Arts. Right after I graduated, I celebrated my 34th birthday, got a camera as a gift, took a trip to Paris and came home with a suitcase full of French pastry cookbooks. The perfect recipe for a dessert blog!

This blog is dedicated to my experiments in the kitchen. I consider it my private journal open to the world. Usually, I test recipes from French patisserie books, most of which will require a scale and candy thermometer (this is a lab, after all).

Sometimes I post a recipe a number of times in different versions. I’m here to learn from my experiments. As they say, practice makes perfect. So preheat the oven, prepare the double boiler, turn off the PlayStation and let’s bake.