The Maginot line between the kitchen and the Internet keeps getting fainter, between the updates of tweeting chefs and the posts from guerrilla food bloggers madly blogging from the bathrooms on a restaurant's opening night (that according to Anisette chef-owner Alain Giraud). But blogs written by chefs are often lovely things, offering insight into the daily life of professional kitchens or how the working chef thinks about food while not offically at work. In the latter camp is the new food blog Bites of Sugar by local pastry chef (now at Tavern, previously at Lucques and AOC) Breanne Varela. Actually Varela calls it a pastry blog, which is a nice classification.

Blogging “allows me to get absolutely lost in the tiniest details of what I'm doing,” emailed Varela the other day. “Hopefully people will be interested in what I'm posting. It also offers me new challenges–widgets, plug-ins, etc.”

Varela says that her blog is an opportunity to showcase her knowledge and recipes, as well as “those people in my life who are amazingly talented. We cooks are only as good as our ingredients. This acts as my platform for promoting farm-to-table and sustainable cooking.”

For the project, Varela is learning more about photography–increasingly a required skill for bloggers. “I'm just an ordinary person exploring my digital camera through food… Every day, when the sun is setting and we're getting ready for dinner service and closing down the larder, shadows and bursts of sunlight come through the windows.” Sunlight on macarons. Very cool.

As for who which chef blogs Varela reads, she says that she likes former Chez Panisse pastry chef David Lebovitz's blog and Le Bernardin's chef Michael Laiskonis's blog Notes From the Kitchen. Blogs written by non-chefs? Cannelle et Vanille, Lemonpi, foodbeam, and Kitchen Musings.

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