Here’s a crash course in rising to the level of adorable, professional-class husband -  say these words to your wife:  “Would you like to go to Paris alone for the weekend?”

“Merry Christmas,” my instantly desirable husband said.

So, I’m about to set off in Paris to see the Gertrude and Leo Stein Collection at the Grand Palais.  The show is traveling to the U.S. this winter, but Gertrude Stein said, “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.”  I want to see her collection of paintings - some of the greatest Modernist and Cubist work in the world, collected by a genius - in her hometown.  This weekend is my painterly equivalent of an orgasmic chocolate dessert to which people politely protest for a nano-second -  “oh, no, I shouldn’t,” and then dive in with a large spoon, battling away sharers with their elbows.

I’ll see the Stein paintings up close, feel their paint, their color, their size, their human-ness, and then I’ll step onto the streets of Paris, and stroll north to Montmartre, where Picasso, Matisse, the poet Guillame Appollinaire (another Stein favorite), really anyone painting, selling paintings, or just thinking in those years, drank, argued, and roamed.  All this is like chocolate, pecan, truffle cake in a pool of pistachio creme anglaise beneath a salted caramel cage.

So, who better to be on my flight to Iceland than the best dessert-maker on Cape Ann, Dorthe Noonan, the baker of Red Velvet Cake and Apricot Marzipan Pie (please?) from Cape Ann Coffees?  Dorthe’s on her way to celebrate Christmas with her family in Copenhagen.