New stuff at La Bonne Vie...again

Back in the middle of July, our executive pastry chef resigned....ALREADY.  He was with us for less than a year.  He had his family back in Las Vegas where he's from, and decided to go back for his family.  We supported his decision to leave--family is important.
But we are now in the process of looking for a new exec.  In the meantime, our sous chef has taken charge, bringing about a lot of changes in the La Bonne Vie pastries.

He had been gone for a week for a sugar-work class in Paris.  When he returned, he was raving about the pastry shops of Paris, and excitedly reported that what we're making at La Bonne Vie is pretty much the same as those of Paris...which is pretty awesome I must say.  He now wanted to incorporate a lot of his discoveries ideas into our pastries, making them more fancy and refined.

Over the course of a week or two, he came up about a dozen new pastries, while keeping a few of our previous ones.
#1 Peanutbutter-Mousse Decadence
A block of peanutbutter-chocolate mousse, on rectangular tart shell filled with ganache and crispy chocolate pearls.

Here's the cross-section.  It's decadent, but not very sweet, which tones down the overall richness.

#2 Passionfruit Globe/Dream
A chocolate sphere filled with passionfruit mousse, on a square tart shell filled with passionfruit curd and feuilletine.  Our sous chef loves to play with textures, so I like how his pastries incorporates the full range of textural contrasts.  As for the flavor...not a big fan of this one.  While textually interesting, the flavor is predominantly just passionfruit, making it somewhat one-toned.

#3 Fruit Tarts and Red-Berry Tarts
Pretty self-explanatory.  We switched out the puff pastry for tart shells, which is readily available.  No need for us to bake off the puff strips every morning.  Filled with pastry cream and topped with mounds of fruits.

#4 Bienenstich eclairs (i.e. Bee-sting eclairs)
Bienenstich is a German dessert that consists of sweet yeast dough with caramelized almond and honey topping filled with cream.  This is chef's eclair version of that.  Filled with almond cream, Bavarian cream, then capped with a piece of honey-almond florentine wafer.

#5 New flavor of macarons
We are making peppermint (in the middle of summer, which is odd) and passionfruit-raspberry (below).
The passionfruit-raspberry is filled with passionfruit curd and a dot of raspberry jam in the middle.
I think (especially)during summer, peppermint needs to be paired with something else.  Chocolate, for example.  Or add a dot of lime curd to make it Mojito macaron. Or add bourbon whiskey to the peppermint buttercream to make it Mint Julep macaron.

The end result...The display cake looked GORGEOUS!!

 Oh, I forgot to mention...see the green glittery macaron?  It's our pistachio macaron, all glammed up with gold glitter sugar.  It's glitzy enough to be worn as a bling.

I'm sure once the new exec arrives, more changes will happen.  Stay tuned....