Bake sale competition among Upper East Side yummy mummies is about to get a little more heated. Not that plain old Betty Crocker was ever enough, but now kids can bring in home-baked goodies by acclaimed pastry chef Jacques Torres, using his new line of baking mixes.
“We were already sending fresh-baked cookies by messenger to offices,” says Torres, who owns two chocolate shops in TriBeCa and Brooklyn. “But nothing can compare to the magic of the smell of freshly baked cookies right from the oven.”
The chef worked with King Arthur Flour, a favorite brand among home cooks, to create a shelf-ready recipe close to his own. “Adapting the recipes was not difficult at all. The two cookies are the exact cookie recipes we make in our store every day,” he says, referring to the Mud Slide and French Kiss cookie mixes (one for Pure Bliss Brownies is also available). All the mixes are sold on Torres’ Web site as well as in specialty stores. Of course, for all those Upper East Siders, the chocolate chips Torres provides are suitably impressive — they’re flat discs the size of silver dollars.