On Sat before the potluck, we went to Bouchon Bakery to get the peanut butter chocolate mousse cake for the party. However, we were lured into buying all sorts of unnecessary goods by displays of all the pastries.
We had for breakfast (in no particular order):
Pate de fruits: they had raspberry, cassis and something, and mango and apricot. They were molded in a round lozenge shape. The raspberry had the lush texture of the ones I had at Chuao Chocolatier in Oceanside, last year. cassis as usual was my fave.
chocolate Bouchon: Basically this is a 2 inch long, cylindrical Valhrona chocolate cake with little Valhrona chocolate chips in it. I ate it, and it tasted just like a brownie. A tasty, dark, chewy brownie with little chips in it. If you like your brownies kinda crusty, this is it.
Financier (apricot almond): very cute and tasty financier, with apricot a nice complement to the almonds in the cake and sliced on top. They were little oval cakes as opposed to the rectangular, gold brick shaped cake of tradition. Tiny, about 2 inches or so long. I like fruit financiers actually. Seems less boring than just almond cake.
Chocolate Dutch (?) doughnut: this was Mark's doing, not me. It was a good chocolate doughnut that didn't taste stale the next day.
Riesling Pear Mascarpone cheese tart (I think that's the name): Mascarpone was delicate filling, nice with the pears. Would have been my favorite were it not for the sticky jam that cemented the bottom of the pastry to the cardboard round it sat on. I've never seen anyone do this. Is this normal around here? Gah!
Chocolate caramel tart: They use Valhrona chocolate here and I have to say I usually like it better than El Rey or Scharfenberger, because it doesn't taste as bitter and weird to me. I just can't get myself to like Citizen Cake's chocolate stuff, prob for that reason, or maybe because I'm a bad person. That said, I thought this tart was a little too sweet, but nothing a good cappucino couldn't solve. This tart would have been great if we had not already stuffed ourselves with other stuff. Tart was stuck on carboard round with jam, grr.
Reeses timbale: This was basically a scaled down version of the peanut butter mousse cake we brought to the potluck except the ratio of chocolate to peanut butter here was higher, with a little disk of I think shortbread on bottom. This was very cute,delicious, with smooth light mousse that was eaten in a flash. shortbread disk was stuck to cardboard with jam, gah that is so annoying and it makes the crust go limp faster.
"American style" eclairs: This means that the eclair was split in half and filled with cream, like a sort of cream sandwich, as opposed to french style where you pipe the filling in and then glaze the top with the appropriate flavor glaze. We had the chocolate and chantilly cream versions, and both were nice, with a layer of what appeared to be chcolate or vanilla pastry cream and the whipped cream piped on top of that, then the top half of the eclair on top of that. chantilly cream was my favorite. Side note: Pascal's Epicerie in Newport Beach, CA does a very nice (french) eclair IMHO, but they only have coffee and chocolate. Both are delicious.
I had a caramel macaron. I hate to say this, but I thought the macarons here were too big. I think the size compromised the texture a little, because instead of a tender, moist, ethereally light cookie sandwich, I got a sort of heavy and pasty one. When I buy macarons, I usually buy one or two of every flavor, but I wasn't really tempted to do that here. Anyhow they only had a couple of flavors. They said caramel was the most popular.
Rounded out with a latte, all this junk made a very sweet breakfast. I figured I would go back and grab some croissants but never made it that far. I'll have to eat here a couple more times, it's really a nice place.
You can tell rich people live here because the trash cans had wooden facades to make them look nice and less like trash cans (I'm guessing). No indoors eating though, only outdoor seats with umbrellas.
Maybe the next time I'll do the multi day croissant tour of Napa/SF. But why limit to croissants?
Pics forthcoming
Edited by jschyun, 23 February 2004 - 08:02 PM.
I love cold Dinty Moore beef stew. It is like dog food! And I am like a dog.
--NeroW
