Happy Easter, everyone.
I swear I walked into the boulangerie fully intending on buying the prettiest patisserie there. But, as in many a quirky rom-com, intrigue outweighed beauty and I went home with an open-faced box filled with brains.
Perhaps my craving for ramen has begun to cloud my judgment. Or the dream I had two days ago about worms taking over the world traumatized me more than I thought. Whatever the explanation, I can't believe I paid three euros for Justin Timberlake's hair from the 90s.
I should have seen the signs when the woman at the boulangerie walked around waving the box on its side, almost certainly smashing half the patisserie. ...Isn't half the price of a patisserie for the aesthetics? By the time I got home, it looked like someone had been overly enthusiastic about patting Justin on the head. He is a pop singer with a penchant for eight-minute-long loops of a single chorus, not a dog (seriously though, "what goes around comes around" - we should have known he was singing about song structure).
This patisserie just confuses me so much. It looks like off-color noodles, so my brain prepares for saltiness. And...noodles on cake? Is that a good idea? And then I think, what tool did they use to pile the noodles on like that? And then I think about how it's all really just a pile of cream that looks like separate strands of cream, but when you eat it it's just cream, and my mouth goes numb and I can't feel my tongue anymore.
At least the eggs make up for it by adding a spot of color to what otherwise looks like processed noodles, right? Wrong. The "eggs" are jellybeans with a hard candy shell, like the lovechild of jordan almonds and Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans no one asked for...and one of them was licorice, the one flavor that needs to disappear from the face of the earth.
I ended up eating all the jellybeans first to get them out of the way, because the mixture of jellybean and coffee cake was bizarre and way too sweet. May I suggest chocolate eggs next time? The cake itself was soggy coffee cake layered with cream and then topped off with a nest of cream (now there's a phrase I never thought I'd say). The creamy greasiness and the mouth-numbing sweetness with a hint of coffee overpowered my taste buds. And the almonds along the side added unwanted texture to the whole affair - now I know what it feels like to have a million tiny leaves in my mouth.
There are not many things I would avoid eating - licorice, bitter melon, fruits of unknown origin...but Nid de Pâques can now join that merry band of misfits. I'm not sure if I should apologize for it, because I'm afraid of anyone who takes pleasure in eating nest-like things and thus identifies with large rodents. Chinese people do eat actual nests, but I still feel slightly nauseous when I think about that time I had to pick feathers out of swallow's nest soup for three hours for my grandparents. Filial piety, man...
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