Tuesdays with Dorie: Chocolate Pots de Creme

French and I have a tortured relationship. I like the food, and the tablecloths and the attitude and all, but I fear the language. For a pronunciation challenged person like me, the myriad French words in the theater and food worlds are a perpetual minefield. I usually bull my way through by saying them slightly snidely, as if I were mispronouncing them on purpose to show those cheese-eating surrender monkeys. I mean, in the end, you still get cup custard. But I will cop to the fact that my aunt had to teach me how to say Pots de Creme quite recently, and I still feel a little dopey saying it.

(Can't say I'm the only one on the internet--yes I'm looking at you, bloggers who present their creations with a hearty 'Walla!.'  No, I'm still not over this.)

I feel just fine eating it, though, and was pleased when it was this week's Tuesdays with Dorie pick. I halved the recipe, and screwed it up somewhat by adding too much milk to the ganache at first, and refusing to skim and cover the baking cups, but the final product, though not picturesque, was some good pud. For those of you don't share my Francophobia, here's the recipe.

French Fridays with Dorie: Gougeres

Welcome to this week's edition of: Katya Joins Too Many Baking Groups.

This one is French Fridays with Dorie, where we cook from Dorie Greenspan's shiny new book Around My French Table, and we are making Gougeres, the savory version of cream puffs, made from pate a choux, soft shiny buttery eggy dough. Pate a choux means cabbage dough. Which I suppose is no funnier than pate a popelin, or pate a panterelli, both of which it used to be called. Dorie was with me when I made my first choux pastry, and her formula remains solid. For the cheese addition, I used a blended 4-cheese mix that my grandmother bought on sale and gave to myself, my mother, and my aunt. Yes, that's how we do these things.

Perfect for a smorgasboard dinner of cheese, bread, grapes, and vegetables. Good the next day for breakfast.  Pretty soon, I'm going to come up with some kind of clever gimmick for writing about FFwD, which includes savory as well as sweet dishes, so that all my posts aren't just I came, I saw, I conquered, but for now it's just the update, puffy as the gougeres themselves, to welcome in the fall and new cookery-bookery. Fresh bread is in the oven, apple-quince bundt cake on the counter, and fresh quinces on the table. Life, it is good.