Saturday, May 10, 10:00 a.m.
Members $45, guests $55

To us, Paris is not the City of Lights. Paris is the City of Pastries. From the moment we stumble, stiff-limbed and weary, out of Charles de Gaulle, visions of millefeuille and madeleines, clafoutis and croissants, Paris Brest and pains aux chocolats dance in our head. Forget the Louvre, the Rue Faubourg St.-Honoré, the Luxembourg Gardens. When in Paris, do as the Parisians do: make pastry a way of life.

Thanks to cookbook author Dorie Greenspan, now it’s possible to recreate that lifestyle in the States. For her latest book, Paris Sweets: Great Desserts from the City‘s Best Pastry Shops, the charming Greenspan has managed to persuade some of the city’s best pastry chefs to disclose their most famous recipes. The book features 17 pâtisseries with signature recipes ranging from Fauchon’s creamy coffee éclairs and Pierre Hermé’s Korova cookies to Ladurée’s chocolate and raspberry Tentation cake. Paris Sweets translates the recipes, from French to English, of course, but also from French kitchen to American kitchen, putting the pastries within reach of hobby cooks working in 110-volt kitchens.

Greenspan, a regular contributor to Bon Appétit and The New York Times whose previous co-author credits include Baking with Julia (William Morrow) and Desserts by Pierre Hermé (Little Brown), will share her recipes and stories. She previewed a few choice ones in an email she sent us about this month’s workshop. About those Korova cookies, for instance: “While there are many famous people who line up to buy pastries at Pierre Hermé’s tiny shop on rue Bonaparte (it looks more like a jewelry boutique than a pâtisserie), the most beautiful of the famous people is Catherine Deneuve, who lives across the street and who makes a habit of stopping in often for a small box of these cookies that are at once munchable and sophisticated. They are cocoa butter cookies studded with large chunks of bittersweet chocolate. They might be thought of as the French version of a Toll-House cookie but, as good as Toll-House cookies are, they were never given the Korova Cookies’ touch: fleur de sel.”

Greenspan will also take us on a behind-the-scenes slide tour of Paris’s best pastry shops—and if they are the best in Paris, chances are they’re the best anywhere—and provide us with outtakes of her experience working with some of the world’s sweetest chefs.