Stars Desserts

"I don’t know much about Emily Luchetti, apart from the fact she was the pastry chef at a very famous restaurant in San Francisco called Star during the late 80s and the 90s. She also wrote another book, Four-Star Desserts ; I have a very warm place in my heart for both. One of my first placements was as a pastry chef, and I loved using those books, because they were a breath of fresh air after all your French basics. When you go to the Cordon Bleu cookery school, you learn something that is quite substantial, but a little bit dated. It doesn’t really belong to this era. There are cakes with names which go back to the early 20th or late 19th centuries; it is all just a little bit out of date. So what I loved about this book is that it felt very contemporary. You can actually cook something which is extremely complex and very intricate in its process, but still feels fresh. I worked in a little restaurant called Launceston Place in South Kensington for a year or so, and I was in charge of the pastry department; at least ten of my desserts came from Emily Luchetti’s books. I spent hours reading through them. They are easy enough to use, but they still feel very professional, and I know quite a few professionals who are using these two books because they yield a wonderful result and are not overly heavy or complicated."