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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