Not Just A Sweet - Kuroiwa Patisserie

We've never been ones to shy away from pastry, but we've just found some of the most lovely pastry, bound to make one re-consider eating the gorgeous thing.  We're talking about the work of Ayako Kurokawa, a Brooklyn based patissier, who has earned her stripes at Modern at MoMA and the Plaza Hotel. 

With her creative flair, she's turned pastry into art (just how we like it).  Cookies become are portraits of people from the subway, biscuits into drawings of hands young and old, loaves of bread braid themselves into fashionable hats, and whimsical lip cookies beg to touch our lips.  The only trouble is, how to eat such beautiful masterpieces??!?!

Some of our favorites:

Butter Sandwich Cookies with Rum Raisins

Dog Cake

Portrait Cookies

Bread Hat

Hand Cookies

Flamingo Biscuits

Chouquette

Ms Kuroiwa also makes traditional cakes and pastry, which are lovely and lust worthy.  Order one here.

A Baker, A Surfer, An Accordianist & Her Lover

Chad Robertson's new book, Tartine Bread (Chronicle, September 2010) from his eponymous well-loved San Francisco restaurant showcases his famous but humble country-style artisan breadbaking methods. This video of Chad and his bread tasting buddies has us fully on-board with the program. We're packing our bags and hopping a flight Westerly, so we can tear into some piping hot, crusty bread tomorrow morning.

Tartine Bread from 4SP Films on Vimeo.

Get Thee to the Boulangerie

photo from our friends at nowness

Fun fact about bread: In the olden days, women who thought they were possessed by a sexual demon would eat a phallic-shaped bread roll to exorcise it. There are lots of ex-voto breads in Italy and lots of sexual breads that look like male and female sexual parts—baguettes and breads with cracks.

Well, we won't kill the messenger, especially since he looks like this:

Meet Gontran Cherrier, experimental baker (uh, rye bread with miso?), bread scientist and all around heart-throb. God bless the man, he even takes time to rail on the Atkins diet. We love him for that! The full interview via Nowness is here. This guy's on the rise - at 31 years old he's already hosted his own show on Canal+ and authored 6 cookbooks. His first bakery opens in Paris this month. Let's woo him stateside, shall we? We hostesses are starting to brush up on our French right now. Voulez-vous coucher avec... nope, wrong phrase. Wait... is it?

If you ever doubted the sexiness of bread, we invite you to reacquaint yourself right now.