Holiday Recap--Christmas goodies at La Bonne Vie

During the holiday season, we had a special limited-edition Christmas pastries at La Bonne Vie.

We had vanilla and chocolate eclairs decorated with cute spun sugar toadstool.

And what's Christmas without a Buche du Noel? These are filled with rich praline creme, slathered with hazelnut buttercream and cut into individual portions.

 On top of the insane amount of macarons--of our usual flavors--that we had to make, we also had the holiday limited-edition macaron flavors.  These are the Eggnog macarons, filled with eggnog buttercream and sprinkled with a bit of nutmeg.  I used eggnog compound and *ahem* dark rum to make it extra noggy.

And these are bicolored Peppermint macarons;  both the shells and the filling contains peppermint flavoring.  These were for a special order--and hopefully I won't have to make them any more.  This flavor requires a double-batch batter, with one white and the other colored pink.  The batters are placed separately in two small pastry bags, then placed in a large one--so you get two different colored bags together in one bag.
This results in bicolored macs.  Unfortunately, this also resulted in an overstuffed pastry bag that my tiny hands had to strain to squeeze and pipe.

I was pretty certain that I'll be getting arthritis or carpal tunnel after I was done...
But they turned out absolutely beautiful!

Peppeminty pink-and-white swirly perfection!  The customers were very happy!
Other new pastries includes these Raspberry Financiers.  The base is hazelnut financiers filled with pastry cream, then topped with raspberries.  The whole thing is glazed with apricot gel (it helps "glue" everything together and also prevents the fruits from drying out), and finished with snow sugar and pistachios.

When chef made these first, they looked awfully familiar...then upon some Google search, I found some Parisian pastry shops that sell something very similar.  Not only that, these types of pastries are actually quite common in Paris.  It's been a few months since we started selling these, and they are kinda-sorta-maybe popular.  There are days when these disappear pretty quickly, and then other days when they don't sell at all;  it's really hard to predict.  The only that has been constantly selling really well are the macarons. :P