My Paris-and-tea-cup themed birthday cake

I don't like surprises. So when a milestone birthday of mine was approaching, I told my husband what I wanted as my gift. A cake. No jewelry, no flowers. No surprise party. Definitely, no surprise party. Just a cake.

Is this a test, he asked me in disbelief, was I going to be disappointed if I got just a cake? I assured him, I wouldn't.

And you can see why. I didn't want just any old birthday cake. A Cake Boss-type, amazeballs, I-can't-believe-it-cake.

Dorie Greenspan's Tiger tea cakes

Hello readers, it's been a while. Longer than I realized, in fact, and part of the reason for that is that I'm on a serious diet.

After several months of illness, and being stuck at the same weight for more than a year, I decided to do something to lose the rest of my baby weight.

Chocolate and Zucchini's chocolate-dipped hazelnut marbles

Pressed for a last-minute sweet for dinner guests, after my macarons failed miserably, I turned to my copy of "Chocolate & Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian kitchen." Penned by food blogger extraordinaire Clotilde Dusoulier, I read this book cover-to-cover on a train ride from Paris to Amsterdam. It holds a special place in my heart for several reasons: Clotilde's was the first food blog I ever read and bookmarked; I bought this book at Paris' legendary Shakespeare and Company bookstore; and finally, all the recipes I've tried, so far, are divine.
To find some inspiration for my after-dinner sweets, I turned to the chapter entitled Mignardises, French for the "sweet bites" that you get with your coffee at a high-end restaurant. Clotilde says in her blog that the word comes from mignard, "an old-fashioned word which, as a noun, means a small child, and as an adjective means delicate, graceful and pretty."
I happened to have all the necessary ingredients to make the Chocolate-Dipped Hazelnut Marbles, or Billes de Noisettes au Chocolat in French, so I happily set forth.
The end result was these elegant bites of hazelnut heaven that like miniature candied apples and taste like the Ferrero Rocher. The list of ingredients is short and to the point: 1 cup of shelled hazelnuts, 3/4 cup of confectioners' sugar; fine sea salt; 2 teaspoons honey; and 3 ounces of good-quality bittersweet chocolate.

Directions:
In short, you husk the toasted hazelnuts and pulse them with the sugar and salt in a food processor. Then you add the honey with a tablespoon of hot water, and stir the mixture. After leaving the bowl in the refrigerator, you shape the paste into marble-sized balls and plant toothpicks in each one.
After melting the chocolate, and this is the tricky part, you dip the marbles in the chocolate. Rather than try to twirl the marble in the melted chocolate, use a small spatula to spread the chocolate around the hazelnut paste.
Leave the top uncoated so that the paste peeks through. Let the excess chocolate drip off and then let rest somewhere for a couple of hours in a cool place.

My substitutions: I used dark chocolate rather than bittersweet chocolate. Also, despite the directions, I grew impatient and threw the tray in the fridge, despite the recipe warning against this tactic. I wish I had Clotilde's foresight because my husband opened the fridge door and the whole tray went tumbling down. Luckily for me, and him, I had tried them before they had set completely. The recipe also suggests making the marbles with almonds or pecans.

Grade: Four stars out of five. While I will make these chic mignardises again, happily, they were tricky to make and time-consuming too. Set a couple of leisurely hours aside to make these from start to finish, turn on the Carla Bruni tunes and have a glass of wine. Otherwise you'll be sweating when you're in a rush to shape these tiny marbles and dip them carefully in the chocolate. And you might be tempted to, like I did, put them in the refrigerator.

Is the French cafe on its way out?

"The bar of a cafe is the parliament of the people,” Honoré de Balzac once wrote. First it was the outdoor smoking ban, and now this: The New York Times is reporting that "Across France, Cafe Owners are Suffering." According to the New Times, had 200,000 cafes in 1960 and now it has fewer than 41,500, with an average of two closing every day. The economic downturn - and changing attitudes, to be sure - are hurting traditional cafes. What is to become of the Paris I know?
Since my first trip to Paris at the age of 12, then as a rebellious backpacker at 18, then as an optimistic university student in London at 21 then as a married woman years later, to me the iconic cafe has epitomized everything that is good about Paris -- a refuge for artistic souls, a hangout for chain smokers, a clandestine rendezvous for the amorous, a spot to watch the world walk by.
Whether you want to linger over your salty frites, or swallow your espresso in one shot at the counter, the cafe is the city hall, school, bar, and town square in one.
When I visited Paris earlier this year, I made a stop at the hustling and bustling tourist trap Les Deux Magots, once the rendezvous for philosophers-cum-lovebirds Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
For the first time though, I got a seat in the front "row" and watched Parisians smirk at les idiotes who were forking over a fortune for a cafe creme. I didn't care, I was breathing the same air Hemingway breathed.
But that wasn't the case when we had our morning coffee at the neighbourhood cafe in the Marais district, where we stayed. At best, one-third of the seats were ever filled and that was during the morning rush. When cafes close down, what will replace them?