A Very Excitable Evite

A little while back I got a very excitable Evite from Anita & Lars inviting me to their home to celebrate Nadine’s graduation from Le Cordon Bleu Pastry School. “How very lovely!”, I thought. Except that I didn’t know Anita or Lars. Or Nadine. I figured, since there are so many Carrie Browns roaming around the place, that they had mistakenly used the wrong email address. Which was a shame. I can’t think of many better ways to spend a weekend afternoon than celebrating someone’s graduation into the wonderful world of pastry. Ah well. I sent them a note thanking them for the invitation, congratulating Nadine & wishing them all a splendid party.

A day later I got an email from Nadine. And I realized that I *did* know Nadine – virtually at least. You might remember a while back that I had breakfast with a whole gaggle of gals, none of whom I knew. The common denominator to us all is a lady in New York by the name of Julie, who I know virtually through work. I have still never met Julie face-to-face & if she walked in the door now I wouldn’t know her from a bar of soap.

Anyway, turns out that Nadine is another one of Julie’s galpals. Over the last few months, Nadine and I have exchanged various emails about meeting up for breakfast, but the stars in our calendars have never quite aligned yet.

Once Nadine connected the dots for me on the Pastry Chef Graduation invite, there was pretty much nothing that would have stopped me from going. Not even the winter storm that dumped itself on Seattle that morning.

So, if you’ve ever wondered what you’d learn on a Cordon Bleu Pastry Course, here, for your viewing pleasure, are some of the spoils of Nadine’s talent. I can assure you that they tasted even better than they looked.

Nadine – you did an outstanding job! THANK YOU for the invitation & for welcoming me into your world. You rock.

{The recipes are copyrighted by Cordon Bleu & I am not able to share any of them here for this reason.}