Epiphany: Frangipanes and cockles get their beans from the game

The feast continues this time with L’Épiphanie synonymous with cockle and Parisian pancakes or frangipane. A tight calendar this year in line with Christmas, New Year’s Eve. Pastry chefs remain hard at work in this frantic race for sweet treats. Since last year, the Cabbage Artisan Lab located at 13 rue de Lille in the Agen south zone has diversified. In addition to the 750 Christmas logs and 10,000 choux buns made this year, Thomas Guiller the manager and his team will make 1,000 plain brioches with orange blossom or chocolate chips.

Strong demand

“The hulls did really well last year and we had requests from the start on Friday.” So the batches of shells for 6-8 people (single format) will follow one another with a nice batch of beans representing small animals in balloons in a metallic pop art style. But be careful, today Sunday and tomorrow Monday the Cabbage Lab is closed, you will have to wait until Tuesday to taste its mousseline kings.

At Lou Panaïga 23 boulevard Édouard-Lacour in Agen, we like to vary the pleasures, if the shells remain classic, the puff pastry pancakes take a few liberties. There are some with chocolate hazelnut, blueberry raspberry, caramel apple and frangipane flavors as well. The beans revisit the bakery theme.

5 different beans to earn a year’s worth of bread

At the Ange bakery at 916 avenue du Midi in the south zone, four baguettes per day over a year are up for grabs provided you bring in 5 different beans by January 31, which will give you the right to be drawn. Market value of the bread offered, a value of 1,000 euros. If by chance you are drawn by an innocent hand on February 1st, and you live alone, you will be invited to remove the four wands and offer them to your family, your neighbor, a destitute person. Note that it is the first five customers to bring back 5 different beans who will be entered into a draw and the operation, which is national across all the chain’s bakeries, will stop there. “Last year, employees of a company contributed to the pancakes and once they were big winners, they rotated to benefit from the bread all year round,” says a manager. At Ange too, the pear chocolate and chocolate hazelnut flavors are added to the traditional frangipane. Here again, the beans explore in a comic book way the inner workings of the operation of Ange bakeries.

At the Fabrique du Pâtissier 46 rue Montesquieu in Agen, the king mousseline does not contain orange blossom or bitter almonds, it comes from another recipe, indicates the owner while keeping an element of mystery. “Last year, we made 1,800 pancakes between the shell and the classic frangipane with pastry cream mixing vanilla and almonds.”

This year, originality, she indicates that it is the return of children’s games in their collection of beans: Sophie the giraffe, a frog, a rattle, the pyramid of colored circles to assemble… On this Sunday, the Fabrique du pâtissier is open from 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., “but we are closed tomorrow Monday. We haven’t had much rest. The holiday period was close and busy, so if we didn’t close tomorrow, we left at the beginning of this week for two weeks straight.

Other safe values

At Moulin du Cros, 88 avenue Jean-Jaurès, and its little sister De Blés en wheats 47 boulevard Edouard-Lacour, it’s the active period for cockles with sweet lemon-orange fragrances and frangipane pancakes. No custard to accompany, but recipes that have proven their worth and that customers are snapping up, with this year’s highlights being a collection of ceramic éclairs. At Brioche Gourmande, boulevard de la République, it is still the ancestral recipe of the Serres family that we continue to apply with the success we know and its custard infused with bourbon vanilla beans. One really doesn’t work without the other. But it is better to book. At the Feyt patisserie, 14 rue Bajon in the Cité Floréal, which can boast 58 years of existence, the shells have a house perfume kept carefully secret and the frangipanes are stuffed with a traditional almond cream. Note to bean collectors, a theme is proposed on the characters of the nativity scene but modernized in gold, white and black, another on Brazil with Christ Corcovado at the head, but also birds, rugby and little brown bear.