Understated elegance would be the best way to describe the pastries at Croissant Du Jour. Warm, simple, and welcoming would be the best way to describe their atmosphere and service.We'd heard there was a French bakery in town, but hadn't had time to find it until this morning. Oh the lost time; we should have searched for it sooner.
We stopped in just before the rain really picked up again, and I was thrilled to see items I'd only imagined being able to get so close by. Chocolate filled croissants, almond pastries, fruit custard tarts, genoise cake, beautiful little individual French cheesecakes, apple tarts, apricot tarts, and there it was... croque em bouche. There were more items, but we selected three at the display cases, from the baker himself, Chef Ian Cummings, and took a seat.
The French cheesecake had a smooth, eggy emphasis that reminded you, cheesecakes are really custard pies. The tart crust was almondy, and not a bit crumbly. It held together well and didn't upstage the gentle flavors of the cheesecake itself.
The apricots on my tart were just cooked so they retained some firmness, were tart, mildly sweet, and just kissed with the bitterness that makes apricots such nice companions to pastry and coffee.
The star of the show was the croque em bouche. My judgement may be skewed a little just because I've never see this dessert sold here. Croque em bouche is something I think of existing only in the pages of my cookbooks and pale attempts in my own kitchen.This rendition was served chilled, which would normally introduce problems as sugar is a strong water attractant. If you were to keep croque em bouche in a refridgerated case and serve individual pieces to customers, the spun sugar it's often decorated with would quickly draw moisture from condensation into the sugar, it would melt, and you'd have a runny mess atop your vanilla cream filled cream puff. Oh sure, I'd eat it, but the elegance (and maybe the characteristic crackle) of the dessert would be gone.
Chef Cummings chose to only drape individual cream puffs with the traditional bronze curtain of melted sugar. Treating individual cream puffs this way instead of in the pyramid of them they're often served ensures sugar is thin in places, thicker in others, and creating a hard crystal pool just along the edge of one side of the cream puff.
The amber sugar has a fun 'crack' as you fork through it watching the glass-like surface craze and fracture, and a sweet crunch that's just this side of three-year-old's dream of a world where there's only desserts for dinner. What a pleasure.
The coffee was good too, something that is strangely forgotten at even the best bakeries.
We never felt hurried, we were welcome to linger as long as we liked, and the music was enjoyable, but quiet. Chef Cumming's wife Isabelle, was charming and relaxed in her approach to each customer. This will be a new haunt for us. We're so lucky to have this in Cedar Rapids.
