Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 26 this year. The week before it is when the question tends to arrive: is there any chance of something for Thursday. Sometimes there is. Often the honest answer is that the week filled while the person was deciding.
So this is the note I wish everyone had in September. What on the menu belongs on that table, what survives the drive to someone else’s house, and when the date actually needs to be held.
What a French dessert is doing at Thanksgiving
Nobody is asking you to replace the pie. Pie is the point of the day for a lot of families, and the person who has made it for thirty years should keep making it.
What a French dessert does is give the table a second option that eats lighter after a heavy meal. A fruit tart with a crisp shell and a thin layer of cream is a different experience from a slice of pecan pie, and by nine in the evening a surprising number of people want the tart. It also gives the guests who do not care for pie, and there are always a few, something that isn’t a fallback.
What on the menu suits November
The apple rose tart. Thin slices of apple arranged in a spiral over the filling, glazed, baked until the edges catch. Apples are the fruit of the season, which I covered in the piece on why the menu follows the fruit, and an apple tart in November is a dessert in its own right rather than a substitute for something out of season. On a Thanksgiving table it also looks like it belongs there.
The raspberry and chestnut tart. Chestnut is the flavor of fall in a French kitchen. Paired with raspberry it is sharp and rich at once, and it is the piece I would put next to the pie for the guest who wants something they have not had before.
The pine-nut tart. Toasted, nutty, not very sweet. It goes with coffee at the end of the evening better than almost anything else on the menu.
Madeleines. Not for the dessert course. For the morning, with the coffee, while the kitchen is busy, or for the day after with the leftovers. A box on the counter on Thursday morning disappears before the turkey goes in.
A whole cake. A Forêt-Noire or a Fraisier is a centerpiece and it makes sense when the dessert course is the occasion, or when the host is bringing one thing and wants it to be the thing people remember. It needs a refrigerator waiting at the other end, and it needs to be eaten that day.
Counting for a holiday table
A Thanksgiving table isn’t a dinner party. There is already a pie, sometimes two, and everyone has eaten more than they meant to. A French dessert here is a second dessert, so the numbers are smaller than the usual per-guest planning would suggest.
Plan for fewer pieces than the head count, not more. Slices are thin, half the table is sharing, and the pie is taking the other half. Two different things in small quantity make a better spread than a lot of one thing. Madeleines are counted separately, because they are eaten at a different hour.
Bringing dessert to someone else’s house
A good deal of Thanksgiving dessert is carried to someone else’s house.
Tartelettes travel well: flat in the car, in their box, straight into the host’s refrigerator on arrival. Madeleines travel well and need no refrigerator at all. A whole cream cake travels if it has a level seat, a cold car, and a fridge with a shelf cleared at the other end. Ask the host to clear that shelf before you leave. On Thanksgiving afternoon there is never room in the refrigerator, and a fraisier balanced on a stack of containers is how a cake gets ruined.
Once it arrives, the same rules apply as any other delivery: cream and fruit go cold, madeleines stay out, nothing goes in the freezer.
The dates that matter
Whole cakes on the menu need 48 hours at minimum, and tartelettes are usually same-day or next-day. That is an ordinary week. Thanksgiving week isn’t an ordinary week, and the delivery days before the holiday are the ones everyone wants.
So the rule is simple. Decide what you want in the first half of November and get the date held then. The menu choice can change later. The date is what runs out, and it runs out before the holiday does.
Tell us which day you need it delivered rather than which day you are eating it. A tart delivered the day before and refrigerated properly is in good shape on Thursday. A cake is better the day it is served, so for a whole cake the delivery day and the serving day should be the same, and that day should be booked early.
Where we deliver
Everything is baked to order and delivered. There’s no storefront and no pickup. Local delivery covers roughly 15 miles from the kitchen in The Woodlands, which takes in most of The Woodlands, Conroe, Tomball, Magnolia, and the I-45 and FM 1488 corridor. If the table is in one of those places, we can reach it.
Guests with allergies
Someone at the table will ask. Most of what we bake contains wheat, dairy, eggs, and often tree nuts, and the kitchen handles all of those daily, so we cannot promise a zero-cross-contact product for a serious allergy. Ask about a specific piece before you order and we will tell you plainly what is in it. For the gluten question specifically, I wrote out the honest answer, and it applies to the rest of the case too.
And then it is December
The week after Thanksgiving, the holiday orders start for real. Client gifts, office mornings, the December dinner. If you know you will want something in December too, hold that date in the same conversation. I covered how December fills and the short version is: earlier than you think.
Get in touch with the day you need it and what you had in mind, and we will tell you what makes sense for that table.