Fantasia love

from the Fantasia cookbook

Like me, Valerie Gordon, author of the handsome new baking book Sweet, grew up in San Francisco. Like me, one of her first baking inspirations was a patisserie called Fantasia. After she revealed her Fantasisa love on page one of Sweet, I was putty in her hands.

I won’t bore you with a long description of Fantasia, which closed in 1989. I’ll just say it’s a type of neighborhood bakery that was much more common 30 years ago than it is today, specializing in old-fashioned European pastries -- napoleons, kringles, lace cookies, nut tortes, stollens  -- and staffed by older ladies dressed like nurses. When my mother was at the supermarket down the street, my sister and I used to run in to Fantasia and “steal” free samples that they put out on the counter. We’d each snatch a single free sample and rush out, hearts pounding, thinking we'd really gotten away with something. 

Here's Gordon on Fantasia: “The tables were occupied by beautifully coiffed ladies and the entire picture was one of unspeakable joy to my eight-year-old eyes. It was almost too much to take, such beauty and splendor in one room. . . .The image of the petits fours is seared in my mind to this day.” 

Mine too.

Sweet is a collection of greatest hits from Gordon's career as a baker and confectioner in Los Angeles. I don’t see Fantasia's influence on Gordon's desserts, aside from the coffee crunch cake, which was invented by Fantasia's owner. (More on that later.) What I see are a lot of attractive contemporary desserts made with extremely high quality ingredients. Gordon uses only Plugra butter and specifies Bazzini  peanuts in her blondies. I had to buy a jar of vanilla paste just to make her sugar cookies, but I don’t hold it against her, because: Fantasia.

Reviewers on amazon have found errors in some of the recipes, but there’s nothing wrong with the ones I’ve tried. Most recently, I made Gordon's Durango cookies -- huge milk chocolate chip cookies bulked up with roasted almonds and cacao nibs and sprinkled with smoked salt. They're great, great cookies, but I wanted them to taste smokier!  I love the Roxbury Road ice cream from Jeni's so much that I thought smoke and almonds would work similar magic on these cookies. In addition to dusting the cookies with smoked salt, I used smoked almonds instead of plain roasted almonds and yet no smokiness registered. Am I wrong to think that sounds delicious?