“Cookies and donuts can be as bad as they are absolutely delicious, when done right”

Cooking has always been with me, even though – or maybe because – my parents didn’t cook at all. We ate very healthy at home, we shopped at the organic store, but it was reheated tofu steaks rather than small homemade dishes. Until my adolescence, my mother ran a bookstore in Paris, which I thought for a long time to take over, I did a literary baccalaureate in this direction.

As a child, I spent a lot of time on the shelves of the bookstore and I devoured cookbooks, salivating over the recipes, without ever tasting them. One of my favorite books, of course, was Charlie and the chocolate factory, by Roald Dahl, a delight… As for the series Harry Potter, it was above all the scenes of the feast in the great hall that marked me. And then there was this magnificent bakery in front of our house, at the corner of rue Lafayette and avenue Magenta, whose window caught my eye, with dozens of pastries, each more appetizing than the other. …

An obsession

It was an inaccessible paradise, because at home sugar was very regulated and industrial sweets prohibited. My brothers and I were strongly encouraged to put wheat germ in our yogurt instead of sugar. My mother tried to ban sugar intelligently, but it developed in me a great frustration and an obsession which I compensated by stuffing myself with sweets and cookies on birthdays (where it was allowed), but also, and above all, by baking pastries myself. Because my mother couldn’t prevent me from preparing pancakes and cakes – on the contrary, it amused her.

When I was a teenager, I bought a mini-fridge for my room, which I filled with abominable things, all the industrial chocolate bars and other dirt I had been deprived of. I knew they were “bad sugars”, I had learned the lesson, but it was stronger than me.

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I wandered a bit, looked for my way, my mother sold the bookstore, I went to film school. Everything got mixed up in my head, the sugar, the ban, the magic, my reading… to finally say to myself: “Maybe I can make my passion my job? » I did a few internships and registered at the Ferrandi hotel school to pass my CAP in cooking, then I worked in a restaurant, first in savory, then in sweet.

Once in pastry, I was surprised not to have always done that. It was a revelation: I had found my means of expression. But I also quickly realized that the rhythm of the restaurant did not suit me. I was then a private chef for a family (whose parents wanted their children to eat less sugar), then, during the first confinement, I started making cookies and donuts for friends. After a few days, everyone wanted some. I did a thousand tests in the kitchen, it was obsessive, something on the order of exotic fantasy for me: a basic, popular product, which can be as bad as absolutely delicious, when done well.

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