Carolo sounds like a name I would give one of my Sims. It's a slippery slope, Carolo, because if you're not careful you could find yourself going Carololololololo...and so on for eternity.
I hadn't heard of the Carolo until I found myself in Charleville-Mezières, a small city about an hour away from Reims, for a class project on municipal elections. A friend was kind enough to host me for the weekend while we went about interviewing candidates and taking photos of emptied storefronts, and twas she who made this patisserie known to me.
I let myself get a little too medieval there...
The Carolo is a specialty of the city, so special in fact that the only information I could find on it was on French Wiktionary:"Specialité pâtissière de Charleville-Mezières."
Thank you for that, French Wiktionary. You're a true poet.
But I am not so easily defeated. From what I gather(ed from my taste buds and my friend's mom), it's a meringue-based cake, with cream filling. There must be nuts involved too, there are always nuts involved - probably the filling is hazelnut cream. It's always hazelnuts.
Continuing in the trend of questionably edible things, the Carolo looks like an adobe brick with stubble. I also couldn't cut through it, but it was for crumbly reasons (and not suspicious end-of-the-day reasons)! It was also very sweet, to the point where having one would probably cover any Carolo cravings for a couple of months.
All this sounds very negative - it was honestly quite good, and I appreciate its strangeness and brickishness (in a dog-eat-dog world, a patisserie's got to survive by any means necessary, and camouflage seems like a practical way to go about that). It's hard to be surprised these days (quiet, inner eighty-year-old!) so the Carolo was exactly why I started this patisserie discovery thing in the first place. No, not to stuff my face, although that plays a part, but to see what else is out there.
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