Belgian patisserie and food traditions

A little introduction.

What is Belgian baking, Sarah?

Belgian baking is super varied and it’s all linked to different traditions.

You only eat certain things for certain occasions.

Cakes for birthdays only, tarts for Sunday afternoons, pies for fairs and funerals… Biscuits/cookies whenever you’re at your grandmother’s.

It’s nice, like, there’s a limit to things. It’s not a constant free for all but can feel a little suffocating and frustrating at times for sure too.

Typically Belgian

There is so much to get into; koffiekoeken (that’s an enormous variety of Danishes or Viennoiserie; the best ones are stuffed to bursting with crème patissiere, topped with a chocolate fondant sugar icing), cakes, fruit pies (vlaai!), desserts…

It does go way beyond chocolate and waffles even though I do dedicate almost an entire chapter of my book to working with chocolate.

just a few of the things we could be making together...

The huge variety of ice creams as well as savoury products like salamis, patés, hams… cheeses… or the endless variety of beleg (cold cuts and spreads made from meats or vegetables and eaten on bread). Which are simply lunch, not a special treat.

Some things you could be diving into making

• vlaai: a Belgian/Dutch fruit pie made with a leavened bread dough, lattice top and filled with preserved fruit. Cherry and apricot are the most common fillings, on their own of course, not together in one pie. Commonly eaten when there’s a fair in town, at birthdays and even funerals.

• fruit tart: a crunchy tart base filled with crème patissiere topped with fresh fruit and finished with an apricot glaze. This is the tart your grandmother would get from the bakery on Sundays when she came over for a visit. Cake and coffee, with milk, sugar and not too strong.

• farm-style ice cream with options for making it low-lactose.

• rice tart: a pie made with two doughs for the base filled with baked rice pudding.

• chocolate mousse and riz conde: two iconic desserts served in large bowls to scoop as much as you want.

• sure, we could do waffles too. And breads and birthday cakes and more breads and more cakes! Eclairs!¹

I really enjoy sharing all the little things I learned as a pastry chef and chocolatier and seeing people successfully make the things in my books at home. The step-by-step explanations will help you to make world-class patisserie at home or get started making a lovely baked good with some good guidance.

It’s knowing the right things that gets you authentic results.

Take Belgian waffles. To get that crunch of a Brussels waffle, you can’t just use baking powder, you need a batter made with yeast. You also need a waffle iron you can flip over and can be heated to ‘really, really, boiling hot’. That’s the start to real, authentic Belgian waffles.

Or the way to make great ice cream at home or yummy bread that tastes like it came from a bakery.

You’re able to find all those tips in my books, either the holiday season cookbook or the recipe guides with seasonal collections of things to make. We’ve got one recipe collection out already, all about Fall baking, with who knows what’s next.

I try and add a nice mix of recipes so things for people who haven’t really baked anything before and slightly more challenging ones so there’s always something to dig into.

All recipes also always make the smallest amount possible so you don’t need a ton of people to finish off what you made and to keep things fun while you’re making them. If you do tend to cater to larger crowds you can always double the recipe. That doesn’t apply to anything baked in a tin like a cake or a pie because you do of course need to fill that tin to make it work.

So articles = what is this stuff, book/recipe collections = how to make this stuff.

Upcoming work

I like the idea of seasonal-ness. After all, my book is a collection of recipes for the holiday season and I wrote a Fall recipe guide last well, Fall.

If you didn’t already know this, I usually write a whole bunch before I release any of it. At least, that’s how I wrote my first book and it’s also what I’m doing now.

I pretty much used to do this in my old business too. I used to run an online shop making and selling Belgian chocolates and confectionery and we would have collections of chocolates available based on the season and if they were sold out, they were sold out and they might or might not have come back next time around.

Unlike those chocolates, the articles written so far are still available.

Do take a look at some of them in case you haven’t read them yet👇.

Welcome again to everyone who’s new and if you’ve been here a while, hi to you too, I hope you enjoyed this little re-cap!

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1. This list and the photo gallery originally featured in this article, galleries don’t allow you to add photo credit, I do normally credit the photographer if I didn’t take it. These photos are by Karoline Grabowska and a few photographers through Unsplash and Pexels. Parts of this articles were also part of previous posts but added here again to give everyone some context.