Life is short. Eat dessert first.

I've always been hooked on baking.

My background is inseparable from my work.

I'm blessed to do what I love to do every day.

Reward is a happy customer - and an empty plate.

I always loved cake. I loved the chemistry of it.

Making chocolate is a way of life, not a profession.

After I quit dancing, I tried a lot of jobs. But I could always bake.

I don't follow trends. I make each cake for a particular wedding, or event.

I have a very strong sense of who I am as a Jew and a strong sense of belonging.

Law breaking, graffiti artist, dumb jock that I am, I'm pretty socially conscious.

Valentine's Day is the biggest single day of the year, the biggest sale day of the year.

On TV, I really try to go back to the basics and break down a recipe until it's very easy.

The product I deliver is a luxury item. It's not cupcakes. A team of 10 works on my cakes.

The most successful person is the one who is most inspired. That is true in food and in life.

I have this problem - I don't have hobbies. Everything that's interesting becomes a vocation.

I went to art school first and thought that I'm going to design theater sets. That was my path.

Pastry chefs are very particular people - we like a controlled environment; we don't like an audience.

In order to succeed, you have to fail, no? You ride a bicycle, you fail; you try a few times, you succeed.

I had - like a cat with nine lives, I've had so many different careers and tried so many different things.

My goal is to teach what chocolate is. I don't think my customers understand what it takes to make chocolates.

I like music that is upbeat, such as Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars. Or anything disco - I will listen to that, too.

In a bar mitzvah, you do the candle-lighting ceremony with the cake. Every birthday, the cake is the big moment.

The good thing is, the season of chocolates is during the cold months. During the cold months, I can send ground.

If you buy chocolate with too high of a cocoa content, you might not like it because it doesn't have enough sugar.

I love history because when you strip away the social and political aspects, it's really just a bunch of fun stories.

My parents were artists, so my salvation was to make pretty things - and ultimately delicious things at the same time.

I like crazy, childlike, candy bar-filled cakes with gooey caramel, chocolate-covered nuts, marshmallows, and the like.

Christmas is the biggest holiday in numbers - in terms of gross amounts - because you have one and a half to two months.

I'm a neurotic Jew who doesn't want loans. I can't even carry a balance on my credit card without having a nervous breakdown.

For months I've been working on creating techniques to reproduce Swarovski crystals in sugar using the real stones to guide me.

Pierre Franey's producer wanted to do a show with me. This was around 1998, and I think we shot our first PBS show that same year.

I believe history and tradition is something solid and something we can rest on. I am not crazy about putting new spices in chocolate.

I have a crusade against fondant, also shortening. There's no reason why wedding cakes can't taste good if you know what you're doing.

Really, a wedding is the first and biggest party people throw in their lifetime, so there's a lot of challenges and a lot of pressure.

Repetitiveness and discipline are the secrets of cake decorating. The art comes from the meticulous technique, the way it does for a dancer.

I feel like I'm 18, with the maturity level of like a 14-year-old. I'm still the same goofball; I'm still in college, as far as I'm concerned.

I started cooking around 9 years old. I would make crepes at home for my parents. By 15 years old, I had started my apprenticeship at a bakery.

The process of making a wedding cake is complex on its own, from designing, mis-en-place, baking, frosting, structuring, decorating, to delivering.

By planting more, we find new hybrid of cocoa, and by doing that, we lose some quality. So the price of the very high-end chocolates rises even more.

I still make mistakes today - I always explain to people, when you will make as many mistakes as I did, then you will know as much as I know in my profession.

I make my own chocolate, I grow my own beans, and now I have something about the history of chocolate. I feel I try to go as far as I can into this profession.

Dark chocolate can be good for you, and when I say 'can,' it's about what type of dark chocolates are you eating. Don't eat the dark chocolate with too much sugar.

Regrettably, people today don't watch many programs that actually teach people how to cook, so I agreed to do a competitive show that I think will provide inspiration.

A chocolate cake can include almond praline or blackberry, and a vanilla one can have cinnamon, cappuccino, or pistachio... Each is distinctive, and I bake only to order.

On 'Sweet Genius,' you have to be tough with the chefs, but my goal was to guide them and choose the genius who will win $10,000 - not a bad sum at all for one day's work.

I'm not on a mission. I'm not a paragon of health for anybody. I'm not going to run a marathon or model for 'Men's Health' or go on bike rides with Lance Armstrong. I'm not. Trust me.

I was drawn to bakery and pastry. It's the same discipline you employ in dance - you take the instruction, and you keep on practicing, seeking perfection. You never achieve it, but you strive.

The first time I baked, I failed a couple of times, and I made some mistakes and perhaps ended up with something inedible. Then I was a little bit more careful, and I learned how to do it right.

The great thing about cake is it doesn't feel like work. You forget about work. Kids, adults, they all get the same look in their eye when they're decorating cakes... That's the magic right there.

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