Cake Snob Reviews: France
The enemy of a great dessert is too much sugar.
Okay, maybe that’s a bit misleading. It’s actually not the total amount of sugar in a baked good that makes it bad. It’s an inadequate amount of either salt or something sour to balance the sweetness that ruins it. I find this inexcusable because it’s so easy to fix; just add an extra half-teaspoon of salt to your recipe.
When I went to France I did so with flavor balance in mind, and also with high expectations. I’d been dreaming of eating these pastries for years, and I was hoping they’d live up to the hype. All I want from life is to find a place where I can pop into random bakeries, order the things that catch my eye, and find that they’re delicious. In France, that very thing happened everywhere we went. Even our tiny bed and breakfast in rural wine country had amazing baguettes.
A reminder about how the ratings work: A full cake means you should go out of your way to eat it. Anything under four slices: avoid at all costs.
Rose Praline Brioche from Boulangerie Liberté
I’d only slept four hours on the red-eye over, so I was deliriously tired when I ate this roll for breakfast. I had enough sense to realize I was eating something special, though. This was far different than the brioche I was used to in the US, which just can’t compare to French brioche, which is richer, fresher, and more flavorful. The crunchy texture of the delicate rose praline was a great compliment to the buttery, soft, fluffy bread, and the praline was very sweet. Nearly too sweet to be delicious, but the French actually know how to use salt in their baked goods, which saved the day.
Macarons from Pierre Hermé
A technically perfect macaron shell is judged in many ways: the little ruffled “feet” on the bottom of the cookies should not stick out past the edges. The shells should be crisp on the outside but give way to a moist, slightly sticky interior, and the very best ones will have no gap between the sticky centers and the crisp exterior. Every Pierre Hermé macaron shell ticked every single box. I was awed. I’d never had—or made—one this good.
Hazelnut Praline Macaron
When I said Pierre Hermé macarons were technically perfect, that just means that the shells were. The filling was a different story—and this flavor was waaaaaay too sweet. The praline was dry, too. Macaron shells are so sweet by nature they need a punchy filling to compliment them, and this did not fulfill that role.
Rose, Lychee, and Raspberry Macaron
Beautiful flavors. You taste every one, and they’re all in harmony with one another, none overpowering the others. It makes for lovely complexity in such a tiny dessert. However, the filling was a little too sweet, the raspberry not punchy enough to stand up to the shells. Really good, but it falls a little short of the full cake rating.
Passionfruit Macaron
Absolutely fabulous. The tart, smooth filling perfectly matched the sweetness of the macaron shells and tasted exactly like passionfruit. I can’t recommend it enough.
Lemon Madeleine from Bo & Mie
I should have expected this madeleine to be dry; it’s a butter cake, after all, and butter cakes are almost universally disappointing. It just looked so cute sitting in the case next to its chubby little siblings that I couldn’t resist. If the dry-as-sawdust texture had been the worst of it, I would have been happy, but the lemon filling was so bitter—what kind of monster leaves the peel in when making curd???—that the entire thing was inedible. And it was only two bites.
Kouign Amann from Bo & Mie
This was probably my favorite pastry. Ever. I’ve had many kouign amann at home, and they’re flaky pastry, like a croissant, but with a sprinkling of sugar in between the layers. The sugar melts and forms a lovely, sticky syrup. They are simply delicious. There are no fancy flavors or mousses here, so if something goes wrong in baking, it’s glaring. When I saw a kouign amann at Bo & Mie, I knew it would be the ultimate test for this bakery. After just one bite, I knew it had been executed to absolute perfection. Hearing the crunch of it made BC’s mouth water as he sat across from me. The pastry was richly buttery, and the syrup inside added just a little sweetness and just a little extra moisture. I ate almost all of it before letting BC even try a bite (breaking our halfsies on everything rule,) but he let me finish it when he saw how happy it made me. And that, right there, is true love.
Hazelnut and Passionfruit Tart from Boulangerie Patisserie Bernauer
We weren’t planning to stop in the tiny town of Bergheim, but it looked so cute that I made BC pull over to walk around. My stomach started growling, and we popped into a little bakery. There was a gorgeous tart in the case, which we ordered. It had a crisp crust as its base and about a hundred different layers of passionfruit and hazelnut mousses and creams and curds (too many for me to keep track of, plus the descriptions were in French). The flavors were fantastic, the passionfruit sour enough to balance the sweet hazelnut without overwhelming it. All the subtle textures were lovely, all the mousses technically perfect.
My dreams about France (every one of them pastry- or bread-related) had come true in this moment. I was able to go to a tiny town in the middle of nowhere and find a tart more inventive and complicated than all but the fanciest bakeries in the United States are capable of producing. This is why people go to France. Now I understood.
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"what kind of monster leaves the peel in when making curd" made me laugh out loud