Marine de La Horie, journalist at Le Point and co-founder of the children's storytelling app épiZ, mum to 7-and-a-half-year-old Agathe and 6-year-old Iris.
Your Proustian madeleine?
A really good chocolate fondant with a salted caramel centre. It's all in the baking.
When it's halfway between undercooked and overcooked, I give in!
Your favourite family (besides yours and ours)?
Patsy and Edina from Absolutely Fabulous. When I think of them and poor Saffron, whom they torment and try to fit into their crazy mould, I realise I've still got a long way to go.
Where do you eat lunch as a family?
On holiday, rain, shine or hail, everything happens in the garden of our house, lost on a Breton island, buffeted by the trade winds.
The rest of the year, we jostle for space around a round table.
Also, I spend ages negotiating the menu with my daughters, who would love to live solely on macaroni and beef mince.
What does an afternoon snack with the family look like at your house?
Culinary experiments, not always very successful.
Since I found out that Iris, my youngest, is gluten intolerant, I've been trying out unusual recipes by mixing bizarre flours (spelt, chestnut, maize, lentils...).
Sometimes there are pleasant surprises. The barometer is my daughters' faces when they look at their plates.
A real challenge with the children?
I'm a fan of Japan and every time I go there, I go on a shopping spree in the stationery department of the department stores.
I bring back paper punches that cut paper into the shape of hearts, clovers, Hello Kitty, smiley faces... They keep them busy for hours!
The only problem is that the little scraps of paper have a nasty habit of getting lodged between the floorboards.
Last time, I found the foolproof solution: the embossing machine that prints the same raised shapes in the paper without cutting it.
A recipe you can whip up in no time?
The lazy raspberry-banana crumble (no fruit to peel for hours) and all the measurements by eye, in short, 4 minutes flat!
How do they get away with it?
By making me believe they've tidied their room when everything is hidden under their bed.
They make a big fuss about it when...?
I'm not there to read them an épiZ on their iPad, the daily episode of the children's app I created with my husband.
It's the 2.0 and digital equivalent of The Bold and the Beautiful for kids. It lasts 5 minutes and stops every evening at a fateful moment.
So, when it's the babysitter reading it to them without doing my grotesque impressions of the characters, of course, they make a big fuss about it... 😉
A favourite product from "À la Mère de Famille"?
I'm allowed two? The praline Rocher and the chocolate-covered marshmallows.
A gift for "À la Mère de Famille" for her 255th birthday?
A disco bus that would travel all over Paris to let the uninitiated taste all the wonders of the house, the aforementioned specialities.
As Annie Cordy used to say, Cho Kakao, if you give me chocolate, what will you give me?
Langues de chat!
