Pascal Caffet :: Wendy
By Paris Patisseries in Pascal Caffet
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When you visit your favorite bakery, cupcakery or pastry shop, what do you expect them to say when you ask for your regular treat? Maybe, “One ____ coming up.” or “Ok, a ___, and anything else?” This is not how things worked at Pascal Caffet. Despite the fact that they had few seasonal pieces, selling almost everything year-round, they frequently only carried 1 or 2 of any pastry. Compounding the obvious problem there was that they did not have them all in the shop at the same time of day. There were many occasions where I’d arrive at 11 in the morning only to discover a favorite had been sold out or to hear, “Uhhh….it hasn’t arrived yet. Maybe come back early this afternoon.” Yes, it did make me feel pretty awesome when I snagged the one-and-only of a certain pastry in Paris, but generally it just got on my ******* nerves. Perhaps that’s why they went out of business at the end of June. People just got tired of their sadistic pastry mind games! But anyway . . . one of the few pieces they actually had 3 or 4 of on a given day was Wendy here. Did the layers of gateaux and crème possess enough abundant deliciousness to make up for her awkwardly un-French and un-pastry-like name? Well . . .
Not entirely. At most other patisseries, this would be a pretty solid piece, but amongst Caffet’s range of pastry delights, Wendy was like the homely little sister that no one else in the family liked — a veritable Meg Griffin à la “The Family Guy”. Let’s break her down from head-to-toe, shall we? Speckled red dome: It’s a hollow hemi-sphere of white chocolate, which perhaps because of the crazy amount of red coloring they used, tasted pretty “eh”. There is such a thing as gourmet white chocolate, but this was not it. Chocolate glaçage: Nothing remarkable here – just present for visual effect, but it does at least echo the choco-tones in the biscuit beneath. Milk chocolate mousse: This was smooth and delicate, with sweet tones of cacao, as you’d expect. What’s weird though is that it’s billed as a 40% Ivory Coast chocolate. Why’s that weird? Because it would be really hard to tell it’s country of origin if it were a bar, since it’s only a 40%, but once you make it into a mousse, only a expert chocolate connoisseur could hope to tease out the soils from which is hailed. Even if there’s almost no point in knowing that tidbit, at least it sounds fancy to say chocolat au lait Côte d’Ivoire 40%! But I digress. Bourbon vanilla crème brûlée: Could not tease this out from the chocolate flavors, but it certainly was creamy. Chocolate biscuit: Very pleasant. Not particularly nuanced, but it was far from being run-of-the-mill. Croustillant Chocolat: My notes on that layer say merely “ok”, so at least it was not a gag-inducing croustillant like I might have found at Sadaharu Aoki. Gâteau base: Texturally fine, but I could barely taste it with all the chocolate it was up against. Basically, the whole thing was just kinda boring.
Now, I feel the need to go off on the speckled red dome. I love Pascal Caffet, and this might be the only time I rip him, but what is the purpose of that thing? Sometimes I feel a little self-conscious for my campaign against pointless garnishes, but I know I’m not alone. Staying at a friend’s house this past weekend, I was turned on to “The Next Food Network Star”, and in the second-to-last episode of the season, one of the judges, Susie Fogelson, totally gave one of the contestants the finger when she pointedly criticized his use of peppers in a dish, purely for color. Her *****-slapping was complete with a dismissive shake of the head, as if to say “shame on you”. I loved it! As I put it to a reader who wrote to me a couple weeks back, if you really are talented, you can figure how to make an amazing garnish that fits in with the piece and is edible . . . not something people don’t know what to do with or something they flick off with their fork before eating. I’ve seen enough chefs do it right to know that silly flare is wrong . . . very entertaining on some level, yes, of course . . . but no less showy and gimmicky.
The irony that half of the photos in this set are about the dome! 
. . .
I didn’t say it wasn’t fun to look at . . .
Pascal Caffet shut his Parisian doors on June 30th, so there is no Wendy for you to buy these days. You could make the trek to his flagship store in Troyes, but I’m doubting almost anyone will do that, except for the few dozen readers I have who live in or near Troyes. I always wish I could recommend something else in Paris that’s similar to what Caffet did, but he was one-of-a-kind. The drama of Paris losing him!
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