Pâtisserie Sadaharu Aoki‧青木定治

The first time I learnt of Chef Aoki was about a year ago,
when his first shop began in Taiwan. I bought a set of his
macarons, beautifully colored, and unique in every flavor.
It didn't take much time persuading myself into visiting
his newly-opened store in Taipei.

Sadaharu Aoki is a well-known pastry chef both in France,
where he launched his first store, and of course, Japan, his own country. The recognized style of Aoki is the fusion of
Western pastry techniques with Eastern flavors. In many
of his creations, for example, we see the use of  the
Japanese ingredient "matcha,"which is a type of greenish,
grinded tea powder (Outside of Asia, some call it "green tea,"
but the two are not identical.) By incorprating extoic
ingredients into French pastries, Aoki amazed the French,
and thereafter started to construct his own world of flavors.

Mille Feuille, the first cake I had that day, was one of my

favorite. "Mille" stands for thousand in French, while "feuille"

means a leaf or a sheet─in the case of pastry, a thin layer.

Three main crispy puff layers, along with two layers of vanilla

cream form the whole cake. The puff's crispiness sure does

live up to its grand name "thousand," you'll know what I mean

with the picture below.

Imagine all of that delicate sheets of crispy puff cracking
in your mouth, and meanwhile, the creamy, melting texture
of the vanilla cream exploding charming aromas. With the
upper layer glazed with caramelized sugar, the touch of
bitterness balanced the whole flavor of the pastry.

The name of this cake is "the Green Bamboo," obvious
enough. The ingredient I mentioned earlier, matcha, is
greatly used in this cake. Layers of matcha powder,
matcha-flavored spounge cake are  paired up with
chocolate ganache, linking the after taste of the tea with
the opening scent of the chocolate ganache, brilliant.

Chocolate Paradise was an OK cake for me. The
chocoalte mousse succeeded in capturing the aroma
of the chocolate and it went well with the spounge
cake. Yet something was missing, the kind of feeling
that always makes you lie back on your seat uneasily,
fearing that you might not have the chance to savor
it again. Well, not in my case, I mean, the cake was
alright, but that's all I call say.