Archive for the ‘confections’ Category

Nabil Debabha Sells Fruits and Nuts

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012
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Nabil Debabha

Nabil Debabha
Photo by www.DiscoverParis.net

Returning home Thursday afternoon after watching a jazz concert on the Saint Louis bridge, I passed by a small shop on Ile Saint-Louis located at the intersection of rue des Deux Ponts and quai d’Orléans. The shop window displays baskets of dried fruits, large glass jars of nuts, and trays of Oriental sweets that look like colorful flowers. The shop keeper, whose name I later learned is Nabil Debabha, called out from inside the boutique that he sells a wide variety of these delicacies. Intrigued, I stepped inside to learn more.

Nabil offered samples of his dried fruits to taste, including dried kiwi, melon, mango, cranberry, blueberry, raisin, peach, orange, gooseberry, goji berry, and even…white blackberry. Some of the fruits, such as blueberry and cranberry, have been re-hydrated in pomegranate molasses, which gives them a delicious, sweet flavor. He told me that some of the nuts have been grilled with saffron and lemon, and offered me a sample of blanched almonds grilled in rapeseed oil, Brazil nuts, Macadamia nuts, and cashews. He grills some of the nuts in argan oil, which, I learned later, is produced in Morocco.

As for the flower-like Oriental sweets, these are made from 80% almond or pistachio paste and are flavored with cinnamon, rose water, orange-flower water, or almond kernels. Nabil showed me his baklava bourgoise, a three-layered baklava consisting of a layer each of pine nut, pistachio, and almond. I tasted this, and it is fabulous!

Goji Berries

Goji Berries
Photo by www.DiscoverParis.net

At Nabil’s suggestion, I purchased 100 grams of goji, a berry cultivated in China. Dried goji are small and shriveled. When I popped a few in my mouth they first tasted slightly salty. As I began chewing, a sweet, mild flavor came through. I can’t think of any berry that has a similar flavor. It is a product that one has to try for oneself to appreciate!

Travelers to Paris will surely be as intrigued as I was to see and sample Nabil’s wide variety of nuts and dried fruits, some of which are quite exotic.

Nabil’s shop is located at 1, rue des Deux Ponts, on Ile Saint-Louis in the 4th arrondissement of Paris. He is open seven days a week from 10:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. There is no name on the store front. Just look for the display of fruits, nuts, and sweets in the window!

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Tasting Bûches de Noël at Le Fournil de Mouffetard

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011
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Le Spéculoos - left - La Nuance - right

Le Spéculoos (left) - La Nuance (right)
Photo by www.DiscoverParis.net

During the holiday season, business has been brisk at Le Fournil de Mouffetard, a bakery located on rue Mouffetard in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. Customers have been lining up to purchase a seasonal dessert called bûche de Noël, a cake dressed up to look like a Yule log. The foot-long logs are sold in their entirety or by the slice.

We stopped by Tuesday and purchased a slice of a log called Le Spéculoos, and another called La Nuance.

Le Spéculoos is made out of Spéculoos, a crunchy shortcrust cookie. This log consists of three elements: a mousse chocolat au lait frosting that envelops a dense crème de Spéculoos center, all resting on a crunchy base of crushed Spéculoos cookies. Just as Spéculoos cookies are a delight to eat, so was this Yule log. It was sweet with a spicy flavor of nutmeg. I was disappointed, though, that the mousse chocolat au lait frosting did not express a distinctive milk-chocolate flavor.

La Nuance is a log consisting of four elements: a layer of crémeux chocolat on top of two layers of biscuit chocolat; a layer of parfait au chocolat; and a bottom crust of pâte sablée. The crémeux chocolat was rich, dense, smooth, and sweet. The two layers of biscuit chocolat were, in reality, soft, moist chocolate cake, not crunchy cookie as the name biscuit would imply. The parfait au chocolat had the rich, sweet consistency of chocolate mousse.

Bûches de Noël are generally sold through the beginning of the New Year. We look forward to tasting galette des Rois on Epiphany, which falls on January 8 this year, and ending the Christmas season with crêpes on Candlemas, which falls on February 2.

Le Fournil de Mouffetard
123, rue Mouffetard
75005 Paris
Telephone: 01.47.07.35.96

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Cupcake Camp Winners

Friday, October 7th, 2011
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Cupcake

Cupcake

I was unable to attend the fabulous Cupcake Camp, held in Paris on Sunday, October 2. I do want to comment on it though, because it was a successful event and its organizers, Cat Beurnier, Nicolette Van der Doe, and Bryan Pirolli put in a lot of effort to bring it off.

Over five hundred persons attended the bake sale, some 2,600 cupcakes were sold, and it raised roughly 6,000€ for Make a Wish France!

Congratulations go out to three winners:

Rose & Cook, for Most Unusual Ingredient with her Vitelotte Potato and Violet Syrup cupcake.

Rose & Cook Avatar

Rose & Cook Avatar

Winning Cupcakes by Rose & Cook

Winning Cupcakes
Most Unusual Ingredient
Photo courtesy of
Rose & Cook

Marie Grave won Best Fall-inspired Cupcake with her Apple, Nut, and Maple Syrup cupcakes.

Photo Unavailable

Photo Unavailable

Best Fall-Inspired Cupcakes

Winning Cupcakes
Best Fall-inspired Cupcakes
Photo courtesy of
Marie Grave

And Rahima Mohammad took three categories: the Most Parisian cupcake, the Make a Wish cupcake, and Best in the Show.

Rahima Mohammad

Rahima Mohammad
Winner in Three Categories
Photo courtesy of
Rahima Mohammad

Best-category Cupcakes

Best Cupcakes
in Three Categories
Photo from
Cupcake Camp Web Site

See you next year at Cupcake Camp!

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Cupcake Camp Winners

Tasting Ice-cream (and Sorbet) Sandwiches at Mococha

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011
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Chocolate Ice-cream Sandwich with Almond-flavored Macaron Shell
(c) Discover Paris!

The ice-cream sandwich is one of the joys of childhood. I remember carefully peeling off the wrapper of this frozen treat and biting through its chocolate wafers into sweet vanilla ice cream. Sometimes the ice cream at the edges of the sandwich would squeeze out, whereupon I would nibble at the ice cream exposed there. Sometimes, if the ice cream was soft enough, I could lick some of it out from between the wafers, leaving the thick sandwich with a smooth, deep groove around the edges. However I ate it, the sandwich was a scrumptious delight and fun to eat!

Always looking for new products to propose to her customers, Marie at Mococha (89, rue Mouffetard in the 5th arrondissement) has begun selling ice-cream and sorbet sandwiches as a novel feature this year. The refrigerated display case is located right at the front window, where she can scoop out the ice cream (or sorbet) and make the confection on the spot. She offers twelve different frozen dessert flavors. A scoop of any of them can be combined with six different flavors of macaron shells, permitting a wide variety of sandwiches from which to select.

Marie sells two types of sandwiches: open-faced (a scoop of frozen dessert sitting on a single shell) and standard (a scoop of frozen dessert pressed between two shells).

Two Open-faced Sorbet Sandwiches
On left: apricot with strawberry-violet-flavored macaron shell
On right: rose-lychee with almond-flavored macaron shell
(c) Discover Paris!

I stopped by her shop to try her open-faced sorbet sandwiches. Upon hearing that I would not eat the sandwich immediately, she placed the scoops of sorbet in a plastic cup and the macaron shells in a small bag. I was to take them home quickly (before the sorbet softened) and assemble and eat them there. I purchased the fixings for two open-faced sandwiches: one scoop of apricot sorbet to be combined with a strawberry-violet-flavored shell, and one scoop of rose-lychee sorbet to be combined with an almond-flavored shell.

Upon tasting the open-faced sandwiches, my partner and I enjoyed the flavors, especially the delicate rose-lychee sorbet. We found, however, the macaron shells to be rather difficult to bite into. Macaron is normally a tender, fragile cookie. Marie later explained that the macarons that she uses for her sandwiches are specially made to resist the melting frozen dessert. A regular macaron would quickly disintegrate when in contact with ice cream or sorbet.

The following day I was determined to try the standard ice-cream sandwich. I purchased a scoop of salted-caramel ice cream, to be sandwiched between two pistachio-flavored macaron shells; and a scoop of chocolate ice cream, to be sandwiched between two almond-flavored macaron shells. Taking the ingredients home, we immediately assembled them into sandwiches and tasted them.

Salted-caramel Ice-cream Sandwich with Pistachio-flavored Macaron Shell
(c) Discover Paris!

As before, we enjoyed the flavors of the ice cream and the macaron shells, but we found the shells difficult to bite into. During the process of biting, they squeezed together, forcing the ice cream out at the edges of the sandwich, where it fell into the plate. We were not, of course, testing under ideal conditions. The ideal condition would be to have Marie assemble the sandwiches at the shop and for us to begin eating them immediately as we stepped out onto the sidewalk. In that way, the ice cream would still be quite firm, and, theoretically, would not squeeze out so readily at the edges.

The ice-cream sandwich—a dairy treat that can’t be beat!

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Sweet Misdemeanors

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011
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Délits Sucrés (Sweet Misdemeanors) are tender marzipan confections made by Claudine Rémiot. These are not the chewy, industrially-produced marzipans in the shape of fruit or animals that Americans are familiar with. Rémiot’s confections are handmade and measure roughly 1″ x 1″ square. They are flavored with fruit liqueur and decorated with natural pastel colorants and little squiggles in the shape of quotation marks. They are so tender that they melt in the mouth!

We purchased a box containing nine different flavors from Mococha, a chocolate and confection shop on rue Mouffetard. (Click here to view a video of the shop’s founder, Marie-Hélène Gantois talking [in French] to the camera on the evening that she held an open house to promote Rémiot’s confections.)

See our tasting notes below:

Limoncello – Limoncello liqueur by itself is cloyingly sweet, but in this confection the sweetness is attenuated to produce a subtly-flavored lemon delight.

Orange – Zest of orange is evident in the first bite.

Café – Assertive coffee aroma and flavor. Coffee drinkers will like this.

Rhum Vanille – Mild-tasting vanilla and rum flavor.

Mirabelle – Full-flavored, sweet yellow plum. The taste of alcohol comes through.

Poire – The fragrance and flavor of pear is immediately recognizable.

Figue – Delicate-tasting fig. Too subtle for one taster.

Piña Colada – As sweet and delicious as the cocktail after which it is named.

Coco-Fraise – Harmonious, delicate coconut and strawberry flavors.

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La Table d’Orphée

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010
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La Table d’Orphée is a catering service located on rue de Bazeilles, just below rue Mouffetard in the 5th arrondissement. It was opened a few years ago by two young men, Alexis and Orfeo, who have been friends since childhood.

On days when we have forgotten to take the meat out of the freezer, we have trekked down to their boutique to purchase dinner. They always have a good selection of house-made starters, main courses, and desserts to choose from! And the best thing is that the cost of their gourmet take-out dishes is about half of what one would pay for a fine dinner at a mid-priced restaurant.

As well as take out, the boutique also has a sit-down dining service, with a specially-priced menu at lunchtime.

Recently we peered in their front window and saw a delicious selection of pastries. Refusing to resist temptation, we purchased two: L’Opéra de l’Orphée and Le Kub de Noël Coco-Praliné.

Pastries in the Table d'Orphée Shop Window
(c) Discover Paris!

L’Opéra de l’Orphée is a thin, multi-layered (I counted eight) cake including a moist, dark-chocolate layer, a layer of coffee-cream frosting, a biscuit Joconde, and a top frosting of dark chocolate.

Le Kub de Noël Coco-Praliné is a cube-shaped, roasted-coconut-dusted cake filled with crème pralinée and a chocolate-cream center. The top is garnished with a craquant au chocolat, white-chocolate matchsticks, and a white-chocolate disc bearing the Table d’Orphée logo. The sides are studded with almond-vanilla-flavored macarons.

Kub de Noël and Opéra de l'Orphée
(c) Discover Paris!

So sweet, so satisfying!

La Table d’Orphée
5, rue de Bazeilles
75005 Paris
Tel. 01.43.36.48.10

Open seven days a week, from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.

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We participate in Wanderfood Wednesdays. Head over there to explore food from around the world!

La Table d’Orphée

Marrons Glacés – A Sweet Confection for the Holiday Season

Saturday, December 18th, 2010
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Marrons Glacés
(c) Discover Paris!

Marrons glacés (candied chestnuts) are part of the Christmas holiday tradition in France. In December, their individual, gold-foil wrappers in the storefront windows of chocolate shops and other confectionary outlets attract the eye and entice those of us with a fondness for sweets. The candy-making process is so tedious and the final product so fragile that only a few companies make marrons glacés in France.

We sampled a number of marrons glacés that we purchased at different chocolate shops in Paris, took them back to our kitchen, and then tasted them, comparing the qualities of each against the others. Read our report entitled “Marrons Glacés – A Sweet Confection for the Holiday Season” in this month’s issue of Paris Insights.

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