Post-grad fellowship application writing fuel

Chocolat fondant and petit canelle. A sinfully rich pudding-like cake and a cheerfully sweet, sticky, sponge-y morsel.

Only set me back 2,50€ and 0,60€, respectively. And the app was finished!

After all, as the pastry wrappers in France advise...

"Eat cake more often."

After-school snack, Paris-style

Four hours of orientation class every day is enough to make any CUPA student hungry (even with lunch before and a snack during the break!). So S. and I decided to make a few stops at the end of the schoolday...

First was the Poilâne bakery, which was a comfortable walk from CUPA. We picked up two apple pastries - one that was round like a little tart, and one that was folded over empanada-style. We ooh-ed and aah-ed over the stunning breads in the window display, though: check out this sourdough with raisin design!

We took the pastries to go and hopped on the métro in search of what is reputed to be "the best cappucino in Paris" at Terres de Café. The store also sells beans and a lot of coffee-making gadgets and gear.

Two cappuccinos, s'il vous plaît!

They came in these chic glass orb-like cups that helped retain the heat surprisingly well!

Both S. and I appreciated the generous little sprinkle of cocoa powder on each...

Coffee and pastry - a match made in heaven, non?

I'm very lucky to have found a friend who enjoys taking pictures of food as much as I do!

Makes even the most boring conversation class worth it in the end!

Bon appétit à nous!

Saturday Vignettes (9/17)

The oldest continuously-operating restaurant in Paris, À La Petite Chaise (obviously out of our price range):

For a quick lunch on the go as I passed through the Latin Quarter, I decided to try out Maoz, a vegetarian falafel chain restaurant. At 4euros 90 it's a tad cheaper than L'As du Falafel and you have a salad bar à volonté (all-you-want buffet-style) that you can use to load up your falafel just the way you like it. The falafel balls are fried to order, too! A basic falafel doesn't automatically come with grilled eggplant like at L'As du Falafel, but the salad bar helps make up for it: you can get carrots, beets, harissa, coriander sauce, tomato and cucumber salad, and even American-style cole slaw!

Here's my personalized creation (lots of beets, carrots, and spicy sauce):

I did a big French faux pas and ate it greedily and messily in the metro on the way to the meeting place for CUPA's guided tour of L'Institut du Monde Arabe and La Grande Mosquée.

The IMA building is stunning. It honors the Arab-Muslim tradition of avoiding figurative decorations (depictions of people and animals) in favor of geometric patters. The walls look like monochromatic mosaics...

But once inside, we saw that the little metal panels were actually little mechanical diaphragms that contracted depending on the amount of light outside - beauty and energy efficiency!

This is the view from the roof L'Institut du Monde Arabe.

Paris is a fairy tale.

Oh hey there - c'est moi!

Our next stop on our guided tour was La Grande Mosquée de Paris (Great Mosque of Paris). Incidentally, it was built after WWI, before France had any significant Muslim population, as a thank-you gesture to the Muslim tirailleurs who fought on the French side against Germany.

The mosquée has a lovely little garden café where you can sit under fig trees and sip authentic North African mint tea from little glasses and choose from a variety of delicious 2euro pastries...

Then, after an unsuccessful attempt to return to West Country Girl for dinner (there were six of us, and we didn't have a reservation), we stumbled upon a friendly little Senegalese restaurant called Le Manguier ("the mango tree") in the 11e that had a vegetarian special, so we decided to dine there.

You simply can't go wrong with vegetable stew, rice, and sweet fried plantains...

Ladurée : the original macaron

Now, on va faire un petit anachronisme [we're going to make a small anachronism] to revisit day I went to the Musée Rodin and the Musé d'Orsay. Why? Because looking at all that impressionist and post-impressionist art helped us work up an appetite, and since we weren't too far from St-Germain-des-Prés (where I tasted my first-ever Ladurée macaron in 2009), I suggested we try and find it (since we didn't have the address).

With S.'s uncanny sense of direction and the help of an obliging newspaper kiosk man, we found it: Ladurée, founded 1862, the creator of the original double-decker, ganache-filled macaron cookie.

(You aren't allowed to take photos inside, so this was the best I could do)

E., S., and I moseyed on inside and drooled over the glass cases of pastries for a while before finally reaching a decision and ordering from the quaintly dressed employees (they look like 19th century maids, complete with aprons and chignons). E. opted for Divin, S. chose a St.-Honoré Pistachio Griotte, and carefully selected three small macarons: orange blossom, lemon thyme, and strawberry mint. At 1euro60 each, they're what the French would call a petit péché mignon (cute little sin).

We sat on the steps of the nearby church, took a reverent breath, and dug in. S.'s St.-Honoré was as delicious as it looked...

...and the logistics of eating it (let alone sharing it) without a knife or fork were quite hilarious:

Look at my three little beauties...

S. and I both agreed that the orange blossom didn't really taste like anything in particular, although it wasn't bad. The strawberry mint had sounded gimicky to me at first, but I was surprised by how refreshing and summery the combination turned out to be. However, it was lemon thyme [left, below] that won the award that day - I love the way thyme, which is generally used in savory dishes, can pop in to desserts to add sophistication (basil also does this quite well, as Princeton's The Bent Spoon showed this off quite well this summer with its Lime Purple Basil sorbet).

But guess what, friends! Ladurée has since added a single-origin Malagasy chocolate macaron to its already-impressive lineup. Guess I'll just have to go back...

More pastry, with David Lebovitz as our guide

You may have noticed by now that I've mentioned David Lebovitz several times already. Well, he's a common hero among Americans studying abroad, and his blog tips about the Paris food scene have yet to fail us. With our confidence bolstered by positive experiences at L'As du Falafel, West Country Girl, and Crêperie de Josselin, four of us set out on Sunday to check out Vandermeersch, a bakery in the 12e arrondissement, dubbed by David (as we fondly call him now) as "King of the Paris Kuglof."

For those of you who don't know (because before this, I sure didn't!), kouglof is the French spelling of the bundt-shaped, yeasty bread-textured pastry of German/Austrian/Swiss/Hungarian/other Eastern European countries origin, known by various spellings in each of these countries.

We arrived at Vandermeersch on a very wet Sunday morning, and joined the line extended beyond the bakery's doors. We peered in the window with anticipation, salivating over the variety of kouglof sizes (the largest was 16 euros; we got the smallest at 4euros and change I believe). Since it was already lunchtime, and I had missed breakfast, I also ordered a quiche printannière, which was chock full of broccoli and carrots and kindly warmed by the bakery employees. A. and I ate our quiches outside while we waited for the others to finish faire la queue.

We decided to walk off the quiches before diving into the kouglof - thereby heightening the anticipation - so we strolled down avenue Daumesnil until we found a café with a few outdoor tables under an awning, opposite this fountain (below). We figured if we all ordered coffees and sat outside, we could surreptitiously consume our kouglof without incurring the wrath of the café proprietors.

Somehow, from the pictures on David's blog, I was expecting the kouglof to have a pound cake-like texture, so I was surprised to find it was much lighter and airier, almost like brioche or challah.

This light airiness is beautifully contrasted by the crunch of large sugar crystals encrusting the outside. When we cut it into four, we discovered that the "hole" of the bundt-like kouglof was filled with candied nuts and raisins!

A few dips of this pastry into our little French coffees seemed only natural. The results of our little outing looked like this:

Finally, since I cannot talk about anything bundt-related without thinking of the classic scene from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," I'll leave you with this link (start at 1:55):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vxZHU0oijE