Bonbon Maquillage

Bonbon Maquillage
Patisserie Sadaharu Aoki, ¥4220/12-piece gift box

In an earlier post on Paris-based Japanese patissier Sadaharu Aoki, I discussed his pastries but neglected his equally artistic bonbons maquillage, or "makeup chocolates". Aoki bonbons are fondant-filled bars infused with a strikingly idiosyncratic range of flavors: matcha, yuzu, wasabi, caramel, coffee, currant, lemon, coconut, Earl Grey, strawberry, rose, passionfruit, orange, blueberry, and raspberry. To prevent customers from reaching for rose and ending up with wasabi, the bonbons are "made up" with a slick strip of edible color--with the result that the bonbon case does look rather like a Shu Uemura eyeshadow display.

When I visited Aoki's Port Royal boutique, I spotted a few bags of bonbon seconds hanging around like stray dogs on an out-of-the-way shelf. I picked the bag with the most varied spectrum and treated myself to a scratch-and-dent tasting on the Eurostar back to London. Sadly, I found the bonbons' charm to be mostly superficial; the texture of the chocolate was fine but undistinguished, and some of the flavors reminded me of eating off a spoon that still has dish soap on it.

But according to a dozen Japanese experts, I have no idea what I'm talking about. In Japan, Valentine's Day is less an occasion for romance than an opportunity to curry favor with male co-workers and acquaintances by lavishing them with sweet treats (women get theirs a month later on "White Day"). The Nikkei's news service commissioned 12 experts to perform a cost-benefit analysis on 122 assortments of high-end chocolates (at least 8 pieces, up to ¥6000/$60). Coming in at number 5, Aoki's bonbon maquillage giftbox was reckoned highly likely to impress the boss.

Patisserie Sadaharu Aoki
Boutique Port Royal
56 boulevard de Port Royal 75005 Paris

Fruits Glacés

Glacéed fruit at a Paris street market, gleaming in the slanting sun like piles of jewels in a dragon's lair: orange peel, redcurrants, clementines, and angelica. When a fit of coughing impeded my picture taking, the stallholder made me all better with a sample of candied ginger.

Indian Sweets & Spices

Indian Sweets & Spices

Another strip mall treasure trove, Indian Sweets & Spices offers groceries, toiletries, a weekend lunch buffet, and a great selection of succulent mithai, Indian confections made fresh on the premises every other day. Whereas many mithai I've had in the past were almost narcotically sugary, ISS's are not quite such a piledriver to the pancreas. They have a mild sweetness that allows flavors like cardamon, saffron, pistachio, and rosewater to flourish.

Here are a few of the dozen-or-so varieties usually available (although I've done my best to match names to pictures, note that ISS is a relaxed place where it is perfectly acceptable to point at whatever you want):




ISS's most popular sweet, gulab jamun, is also a good choice for mithai-curious first timers. Plump, doughy balls of Indian cottage cheese are given a thin brown skin in the deep fryer, then soaked in spicy honey syrup.











Chum chum are essentially oblong gulab jamun, slit open lengthwise and stuffed with flavored, sweetened cream cheese.












Jalebi are big looping swirls of blaze orange dough, deep fried and soaked in sugar syrup.











Gajrela is a North Indian carrot cake, particularly popular in winter. The pudding-like carrot base is topped with pistachios and khoya, a creamy "cheese" made from reduced milk.










Kalakand is a tender, crumbly fudge made from ricotta-like cheese, condensed milk, and sugar, topped with crushed pistachios.





Other choices include laddoo (made from chickpea flour), burfee (creamy slabs topped with edible silver leaf, flavored with rose water and kewra water, a distillate of pandanus flowers), and in the freezer, rasmalai (milk-soaked dumplings flavored with dried fruit and saffron).

ISS sweets range from $5.99 to $7.99 a pound--and they're so dense and moist that a pound notches up quickly. I've found that an assorted box is fun to take along to a party; cut each sweet into smaller pieces so everyone can have a taste.

Indian Sweets & Spices
18002 15th Ave NE
Shoreline WA 98115
206/367-4568

À la Mère de Famille

À la Mère de Famille

Around this time last year I visited Paris for the first time, with a long list of sweet sights to see and a short stack of euros. Luckily a lovely woman I had met at a party months earlier agreed to let me crash on the floor of her genuine student garret. It was nearly midnight by the time I got off the Eurostar, trundled to her place from the Gare du Nord and made my way up eight flights of funhouse spiral stairs; I was cold, tired, turned around, and starting to question why I had come. Then Maria mentioned that the oldest confiserie in France was just across the intersection--8 floors down and not a half a block away. I had a hard time getting to sleep but no trouble at all getting up the next morning.

Founded in 1761, À la Mère de Famille specializes in supplying old-school sweets that are not readily found elsewhere. Their chocolates and a number of other fresh items are made in-house; other cakes and candies are sourced from small suppliers all over France. The shop feels something like a museum of sweets, with treasures displayed in glass jars or polished wood cases and lit by gleaming chandeliers, and transactions taking place at a sort of ticket booth near the back (below right).













Easter came early last year, so I got to see the familiar eggs and bunnies, plus chocolate sardines and bells, sugar-coated almonds (below right), and real brown eggshells filled with chocolate truffle and sealed with a chocolate disc (below left).













There were also bags of fresh marshmallows (guimauve, below left), and hard and soft candies from around the country including tins of anise pastilles and sparkling squares of pate de fruit. The glass-topped cases just inside the door held rows and layers of marzipan bars and Calissons d'Aix, diamond-shaped confections of mixed almond paste and candied fruit from Aix-en-Provence in southern France (below right). Each smooth slab of paste is enameled with a thick coat of brightly-colored royal icing in flavors such as nature, currant, raspberry, strawberry, orange, pistachio, hazelnut, and coffee--oddly reminiscent of display tiles in a bath showroom.













ALMDF has several branches; I visited the shop nearest the Cadet Metro station. Their website promises to be up and running very soon.

À la Mère de Famille
35, rue du Faubourg Montmartre
Paris 75009
tel. 01 47 70 83 69

Kittyhugs Baking Company

Kittyhugs Baking Company

Although named for the owner's cat's tendency to give affectionate embraces, the Kittyhugs Baking Company is no crazy cat lady enterprise. There's no fur flying in the kitchen and no whiff of anything less pleasant than vanilla and hot butter.

Located in a bright, airy storefront in Shoreline's North City neighborhood, the bakery began selling to the trade in the summer of 2004 and opened its doors a year later to retail customers. Kittyhugs' products range from the familiar to the comforting, and are baked from scratch and to order. The menu lists cookies, brownies, scones, muffins, quick breads, coffee cakes, cheesecake, tarts and fruit pies--nearly 100 different items, all (with seasonal exceptions) available to pick up given at least 24 hours notice. A more limited selection of the smaller items is offered for sale to walk-in customers on Fridays and Saturdays.

It pays to stop by early on retail days for the best selection--or for any selection at all, since Kittyhugs will close early if the baked goods sell out (I learned this the hard way). On my last visit, they were down to one brownie and out of red velvet cupcakes. I opted for a vanilla/vanilla cupcake (pictured above) that would be the star of any bake sale. The cake was fluffy and not too sweet, practically groaning under the weight of a generous whorl of vanilla buttercream frosting; whatever your personally preferred cake:frosting ratio, too much (good) frosting is always preferable to too little. It was also fresher, bigger, and, at $1.35, over $1 cheaper than the wares at Seattle's more glamorous cupcakeries.

Kittyhugs Baking Company
1508 NE 179th Street
Shoreline, WA 98155
206/361-5740

Wholesale Monday-Friday, 8-4
Retail Friday 3-6, Saturday 9-2

Gata

Gata
Old Country Bakery, $3.99/loaf

Tucked away in a white-bread strip mall in east Bellevue, the Old Country Bakery serves up a delicious and ethnically diverse range of European baked goods. The bakery has been in business for about 10 years, and under its current Armenian management for about a year and a half.

Seeing me frozen in gluttonous bewilderment in front of the rack of sweet breads, the cashier helpfully suggested the Gata, a top-selling Armenian loaf shaped something like a seat cushion. She described the filling as "vanilla cream" but when I tore in I found that the soft, eggy bread was actually stuffed with a delirious approximation of snickerdoodle dough--heady with vanilla, as dense as Play-Doh, and gritty with raw sugar.

Somehow I managed not to eat it all at once, and even shared a piece with my second-in-command, who usually takes an infuriatingly take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards sweets. His reaction: "And why did you not buy four of these?"

I also picked up an enormous chocolate Napoleon for $2, another difficult choice with fruit danishes, meringues, bundt cake, and three distinct styles of Baklava (traditional, Iranian, and Armenian) on offer. Thanks to a first-timer coupon available from their website, I also took home a loaf on the house (the "Georgian", below right, a huge round bread with an amusing orifice).

Old Country Bakery
900 160th Ave. NE #3
Bellevue, WA 98008
866/523-8169

Open daily, 8 to 8.

Sweetie

Sweetie / Oroblanco

Known in Japan as "Sweetie" and elsewhere as Oroblanco, this white grapefruit-pomelo cross was hybridized by researchers at the University of California. Thanks to its Pomelo parentage, the sweet flesh is surrounded by a tough green or gold rind and a half-inch of doughy, dead-white pith. Just as UC intended, the flavor is sweeter and less tangy than a grapefruit, although the membranes between the flesh sections are just as bitter. I found that the flavor lingered for an oddly long time, growing unpleasantly metallic.

Bibingka

Bibingka
D'Unik Oriental Food, $2.39 for 2 sachets of mix

While I'm on the subject of pre-fab Filipino delicacies, allow me to present bibingka, a golden cake essential at Christmas but popular year-round. Innumerable variations are enjoyed throughout the Philippines and neighboring countries. Even having read more than a dozen different recipes, I can't say for certain what definitively separates bibingka from any old cake.

I bought a box of bibingka mix from the Filipino grocery because I couldn't figure out what to do with the coconut jam or jars of chickpeas in syrup and was feeling inadequate; "Baking," I reassured myself, "I can do that!"

My confidence made it as far as the register, where the cashier looked me up and down and speculated that I probably didn't have any fresh banana leaves.

Banana leaves? Uh, nope, none of those in the pantry.

"Oh well, I guess you'll figure something out."

So I lined my pan with wax paper (the banana leaves of the Pacific Northwest) and set to mixing. The mix itself is made up of rice and wheat flours, sugar, and baking powder; to that I added water, eggs, sugar, and melted butter (although the box called for margarine, which I consider to be the Devil's own spread).

Then I had to choose my cooking method from a fascinating range of options. The preferred method is cooking the batter in 4 small batches in a toaster oven; instructions are also given for cooking in a ice cream can (apparently Filipino ice cream comes in huge tins) over live charcoal, cooking on the stove in a skillet or "mini kawali", and last but not least, boring old oven baking (my choice).

About 20 minutes later I was slicing into a hot, plump, golden-skinned bibingka. It was perfectly pleasant but a little ho-hum, like a moist yellow cake with the richness dialed down a notch and the texture set to "slightly rubbery". I definitely wish that I had sprung for some or all of the popular toppings--sugar, salted duck eggs, white cheese, melted butter, and grated coconut. To see bibingka done right, check out the [eatingclub]Vancouver blog.

D'Unik Oriental Food
18002 15th Ave NE
Shoreline, WA 98155
206/361-9474

Champorado

Champorado
Ranch 99 Asian Superstore, $1.50/single-serving pack

A common snack or breakfast food in the Philippines, champorado is a soft, sweet cereal of overcooked sticky rice, chocolate, and sugar. Although I'd probably pass on the traditional accompaniment of dried fish, there's little not to like about the idea of "cocoa flavored rice porridge". I always imagined it would fall somewhere between chocolate rice pudding and the delicious dregs of all-to-infrequent childhood bowls of Cocoa Pebbles.

So I snagged a packet of Family Recipes' heat'n'eat champorado from the Asian Superstore up the road and spent the next few weeks using it for entertainment whilst in the kitchen waiting for other things to happen; I passed several happy hours gently squeezing the pouch as if building up my hand muscles or mulling over a cheap breast implant, tunefully imploring Champorado to "come to your senses". Finally hunger brought me to my own senses.

If you're out on maneuvers, it's perfectly possible to eat this S.R.E cold and "straight from the pouch"; for a more Martha approach, immerse the pack in boiling water (below) or nuke it in the microwave. Champorado can be dressed up even further with a swirl of condensed milk.

Although Family Recipes promises that when you tear into their packet, "...you are assured of the perfect champorado," I sincerely hope that they are exaggerating. Their champorado might best be described as "primordial", both in terms of its slimy texture and the impression it gives of wanting to be something else without quite making it.

It may be that champorado, like fellow regional comfort foods ochazuke and grits, really needs to be slaved over a little. And I do mean "a little"; from the looks of this recipe, making champorado from scratch isn't that much more demanding than heating and decanting a pre-fab packet.

Bébés Meringue

Bébés Meringue
€1.60/10-pack

I bought these last year in a now-defunct Paris shop that stocked all sorts of old-fashioned sweets and kitschy Catholic candy. Bébés meringues are tough and long-lived as anthropomorphic Circus Peanuts, best served (or displayed) as a conversation piece.

Miraculin

Miraculin
$17.99 for 10 tablets from ThinkGeek

Last Saturday was fairly typical in that my growling stomach and I were staring at an unappealing assortment of food-ish items and wondering by what miracle they might be rendered into dinner. But instead of being alone in my pantry I was at a "flavor-tripping" party hosted by my dear friends Margaret and Bjorn; the food was as weird or weirder that the dregs in my kitchen, but this time the vinegar-into-wine miracle actually materialized, thanks to a little red pill.

Miraculin pills are derived from a small red berry known as "miracle fruit". When eaten fresh, dried, or in pill form, a protein unique to these berries coats the tongue's taste receptors, causing sour and bitter flavors to be perceived as sweet. The effect was first documented by an French visitor to West Africa in 1725 who saw the locals eating miracle berries as an apertif before meals.

So I chomped my pill and bellied up to the world's worst buffet, laden with citrus fruit, Belgian endive, pickled garlic, radishes, plain yogurt, vinegar, cranberries, baking chocolate, rhubarb, espresso and beer. I nibbled skeptically on a wedge of lime--and it sparked in my mouth like fizzy limeade! Ditto the pomelo, lemon, grapefruit and Granny Smith apple.

Miraculin's effect lasts between 20 minutes and an hour, so with one eye on the clock I began to race my way down the table, trading tips with my fellow trippers as I went. We discovered that under miraculin's influence, vinegar tastes like dessert wine, and goat cheese like cheesecake. I fashioned tiny sandwiches of cranberries and baking chocolate and passed them around like canapés.

Frivolous flavor-tripping parties like this had their first wave of popularity back in the 1970s, but miraculin was originally intended as a much more serious thing, a safe and natural way of satisfying the sweet cravings of diabetics and dieters. One US company's attempt to secure FDA approval for more widespread application resulted in a series of mysterious setbacks, on which some conspiracy theorists detect the sugar industry's sticky fingerprints. Today miraculin is legal in the US, but its consumption is mostly a novelty. Miraculin is commonly used in parts of Africa and Asia; one cafe in Tokyo serves a side of miraculin with its terrible-tasting low-calorie desserts.

There are, however, limits to miraculin's miraculousness. It renders some foods tasteless and even an overdose would fail to sweeten some stubbornly sour and bitter foods (see bitter melon, below center, and resulting squinchy face, below right). And then there's the dreaded miraculin hangover, when all those foods that tasted like a good idea at the time turn around and sucker punch you in the stomach.

Rose's Chocolate Treasures

Rose's Chocolate Treasures

In England, "chocolate Roses" are lumpen nuggets of Cadbury's most popular over-sweet, over-creamy "chocolate" varietals, swaddled in festive foil and stuffed into festive boxes to await purchase as lowest-common-denominator gifts for people one doesn't know or like all that well.

In Seattle, Rose's Chocolates are fresh, hand-made buds of high-quality chocolate waiting to burst forth with imaginative and well-balanced flavor combinations: tangerine and beet, blueberry and basil, wasabi and nori.

Score one, Seattle.

From a cozy shop in Post Alley, Rose's dispenses a wide range of truffles and bonbons at $2 a piece. There are primo takes on the usual sweet and boozy flavors, but the house specialties reward the adventurous. The "Mexicali" is an almost savory dark chocolate truffle warmed up with cinnamon, nutmeg, chilies, and cumin, and dusted with gold powder. The Rose truffle pictured above is infused with rose petals and a touch of aniseed. And if these flavors become old hat, chocolatier Vie Sweet is also an astrologer, and regularly invents an astrology-based "truffle of the month". In addition to truffles, Rose's sells both drinking chocolate and cocoa, teas, chocolate balms and body butters, chocolate pasta, and roast-your-own cocoa beans ($1/oz).

In keeping with the shop credo that "chocolate nourishes the body as well as the soul," Rose's offers social and educational events. At the West Seattle kitchen, Vie Sweet leads classes on truffle infusion; each group of six students gets to choose their own flavors and take home the fruits of their labor. The shop premises are also available for chocolate tasting parties from 6pm on Friday and Saturday nights. Self-selected groups of of four or eight guests enjoy a guided tasting of 20 chocolates for $15 a head; b.y.o. wine is welcomed.

And in case you're having trouble coming up with a fourth or eighth person---I'm definitely free that night.

Rose's Chocolate Treasures
Pike Place Market
1906 Post Alley
Seattle, WA 98101
866/315-ROSE

Torta de Aciete

Torta de Aciete
$1.50-1.75 each at coffee shops, boxes from $3.99

It doesn't usually take a dare to get me to eat a new cookie, but in this case...

Early last year I was having coffee in Rosie's, a cafe/deli/bakery in south London's Brixton Market presided over by Rosie herself, a red-lipped, black-tressed retro firecracker who prefers giving orders to filling them. There were a handful of customers enjoying her masterful espresso drinks on that grey afternoon and Rosie figured we needed a jolt. Reaching into a jar she drew out a large flat cracker wrapped in greasy wax paper. She broke the cracker into sections and went around pressing each of us to try a shard: "It's kind of cookie, kind of cracker, with salt and sugar and aniseed. It's really strange! Come on..."

I normally run a mile from anything flavored with anise; liquorice is admittedly an excellent material for making small novelty sculptures, but I'd sooner eat plastic. But since you don't say no to Rosie I accepted a bit and popped in in my mouth while she watched to make sure I didn't slip it into my napkin.

If only I could taste torta de aciete again for the first time! The first bite lit up my mouth like a pinball machine, ricocheting from sweet to salty, lightly dinging the aniseed bell and finally melting away with a buttery finish as satisfying as half a dozen bonus balls.

Torta de aciete, or olive oil cookies, are a Spanish speciality with north African roots. In 1910, in the Andalusian capital of Seville, a woman named Ines Rosales began to sell torta de aciete baked from an old Moorish recipe. At the modern Rosales factory, tortas are still made using the original recipe, and each torta is flatted and wrapped by hand.

In my opinion, the original is also the best, but Rosales has plenty of worthy competitors. San Martin de Porres (torta above and label below) is a little thicker than the croissant-flaky Rosales, with the sugar topping melted into glassy patches instead of standing out in discrete, crunchy crystals; the flavor is great but the texture is a little blah. A newcomer to watch out for is Matiz, a specialty exporter of Andalusian foodstuffs. Matiz tortas are expensive but widely available, and come in a range of non-traditional flavors, including cinnamon, almond, and a savory herb version. The Spanish Table in Seattle's Pike Place Market usually stocks all three brands.

The Martin de Porres label lists the ingredients as wheat flour, virgin olive oil (24%), sugar, sesame seeds, aniseed, essence of anise, salt, and yeast. I wasn't able to find a recipe to match exactly, but this recipe using egg whites looks promising, and for quick fixes when the store is out of tortas, here's a recipe based on pizza dough.

Salvadorean Bakery

The Salvadorean Bakery

From pho to porn, Walgreens to Bartell's, there's not much you can get in White Center that you can't find more conveniently on the sketchier stretches of Aurora Avenue. With one mouth-watering exception: the Salvadorean Bakery. Somehow the collision of colonial and native traditions in the tiny Central American country of El Salvador resulted in a profusion of stellar cakes and pastries.

Housed in a misleadingly drab wood-panel store front, every nook of the Salvadorean Bakery is stacked with treats. An overwhelming array of baked goods peer out of an expanse of glass-fronted cases: wedding cakes, wedding cookies, jam cookies, rice-flour cookies, walnut-and-chocolate cookies, turnovers stuffed with exotic fruits, jalapeño rolls, flaky ear-shaped orejas, and borrachos, plump "drunken" cakes soaked in sweet rum and doused in cinnamon syrup.

Above, my paramour Maria Luisa de Leche ($2.25); I break my try-something-new-rule by buying a Maria Luisa on every visit to the Bakery. She's a plank of dense, rich Salvadorean egg custard, lightly glazed and dusted with cinnamon, resting on a sliver of meltaway crust of mixed white and rice flours.


















The alfajor ($1.25) is a triple-decker treat, a "Short bread cookie filled with Dulce de Leche (caramel)." The cookies melt away like buttery snow, and the dulce de leche is pleasantly gummy. Sometime I'll try making my own, using this video recipe.


















The quesadilla is "A muffin made of rice & wheat flour, Salvadorean cream & cheese, eggs, and butter. It's a very popular Salvadorean exclusive!!!" I opted for the mini version ($1.25), which was mildly sweet and very rich--like cornbread without the corn, or the casutera of my dreams.

If you want to cushion your system against impending sugar shock, the Bakery also sells savory food, including a full range of pupusas, grilled cornmeal hot pockets stuffed with your choice of meat, beans, cheese, etc., and served with curtido, vinegar-soaked cabbage, and spicy tomato sauce. Slide into a blue vinyl booth, belly up to the faux lapis table, and dig in!

Salvadorean Bakery
1719 SW Roxbury
White Center, WA 89106
206/762-4064
Daily 8 am-9 pm.

Kulfi

Kulfi/Kulfee/Qulfi
$2.95 / serving

After a delicious dinner of Nepali and Tibetan dishes at Shoreline's Everest Kitchen, the perfect tonic for overtaxed tastebuds has to be kulfi, the famed frozen treat found all over south Asia.

Kulfi is typically made from three dairy products (hey, if one is good...): evaporated milk, condensed milk, and cream. The mixture is boiled with sugar and thickened with corn starch. Flavorings can include cardamon, saffron, fruit, rose petals, and various nuts. Everest Kitchen's house-made kulfi is loaded with cashews and pistachios, tinged with cardamon, and topped with a sprinkling of dried coconut.

Unlike churned ice cream, kulfi is frozen solid, often in small servings. Once frozen, kulfi is dense enough to fight off all but the most determined spoons; ours came to the table sliced into four sections, but still so unyielding I had visions of accidentally catapulting a chunk across the room. But after a few minutes of patience and heavy breathing, the kulfi relaxed into edibility. It was just sweet enough, richly flavored and with a creamy/chewy texture that seemed to owe more to the nuts than the dairy.

The Everest Kitchen, 14561 Bothell Way NE
Shoreline, WA 98155
206/440-0321
www.theeverestkitchen.com