The quantity of ingredients necessary for these recipes is given in grams and fluid ounces, with an occasional weighed ounce (for chocolate, for example). If you are serious about cooking, use the gram weights. Acquire an inexpensive, but accurate, electronic scale and use it. You will be amazed at how easy it is, and you will wonder not only why you never did this before, but also why all decent recipes aren't written by weight. Know thy oven! Use an oven thermometer, since the thermostat on the outside can almost never be trusted. Underbaking is as bad as overbaking. Both can be avoided if you know what your oven temperature really is. An immersion blender, also called a stick blender or a soup blender, is a marvelous and useful instrument. With an immersion blender, you take the blender to the liquid, not the liquid to the blender. It's not something you will use every day, but when you actually need it, practically nothing else will do in its place. It is not expensive, and you will surely find it very useful, especially for smoothing our ganaches, chocolate creams, crËme anglaise, and so forth. Try to find extra-fine sugar to use in these, and all your pastry, recipes. In England it's called castor sugar. It is much finer than regular granulated sugar, and forms a finer crumb and makes a lighter textured cake because the crystals are smaller. It dissolves more quickly, and it is just better all round for baking and candy making. If extra-fine sugar is not available, make your own by running ordinary granulated sugar in your food processor. It works, sort of. When a recipe calls for butter, use sweet butter (without salt). If butter is one of the ingredients, substituting another fat (dare we utter the term "margarine"?) will not give the same results. Butter is as butter does. It does wonderfully. And nothing else will do. When a recipe calls for flour, consider it all-purpose flour unless otherwise specified. The problem with flour is that per weight, the volume varies by as much as 10%. That's why it is always better to use the weight given, rather than the volume. In a recipe calling for fromage blanc, you might try substituting fresh white cheese or farmer cheese, if you can't find real fromage blanc. Fromage blanc is simply a fresh, white cheese, utterly delicious in itself, and widely used in France. The consistency and texture are important in the recipe. The cheese substitute should be lump-free, almost liquid, and perfectly smooth. Something like ordinary cream cheese or mascarpone will not do. A ganache is an emulsion, just like mayonnaise. The ingredients are different, but the principle is the same. The idea is to suspend tiny particles of one medium (to emulsify them) in another. For our ganache, we want to suspend tiny particles of chocolate in cream. You whisk the ganache until it takes on a certain texture, but not beyond that point. Remember, it is an emulsion, and just like mayonnaise, if you overbeat, it will curdle. Then it must be remelted in the microwave oven and you get to start over. The finished ganache should be smooth, elastic, and shiny. Depending on the proportions between the chocolate and the cream, a ganache can be used to fill candy (our fabulous truffle recipe or the fabulous VALRHONA chocolates made by chocolatiers), as a cake frosting or glaze, or as a sauce. To make a ganache in a food processor (yes, it works perfectly), put the required amount of chocolate, cut into smallish pieces, into the bowl of the food processor fitted with the metal blade. Process until the chocolate is very finely chopped. Bring the required amount of cream to a boil, on the stove or in the microwave oven, and pour it through the feed tube with the processor running. Process for a few seconds. Done. To decorate your desserts, make chocolate shavings by scraping a vegetable peeler along the edge of your chocolate bar.