June means lavender!

OK girls let's admit it.  We have a thing about lavender. At some point we must have dreamed of standing in the middle of the purple lavender field, burying ourselves in their distinct and mysterious scent.

But yet this is a dream. Only a few of us are lucky enough to visit a lavender field.
There is never a shortage of lavender flavoured pastries/drinks/dishes. However, to us there're more misses than hits. Personally we think most of the time the lavender scent is too overpowering and it gets too strong that they reminds us of air refreshener (lol). And this is the main reason that we hadn't been including lavender in our macaron menu until recently.

We bought dried lavender from a neat market in southern France. When June comes we decided to give a shot. We started testing the flavour by making lavender tea. Searching for the right tea was also a challenge because we didn’t want the aroma in the tea leaves clashing with the lavender. So we ruled out earl grey and jasmine.

We settled on Japanese sencha.        

We mixed grounded sencha and lavender with our white chocolate ganache filling. At the first bite, you will first taste the subtle aroma of sencha mixed with some floral scent. After you finish the entire macaron you can still feel the lavender aftertaste flowing in your mouth.

Just like standing in a lavender field.

Our lavender sencha macarons are now in our summer macaron menu. If you're interested email us at order@fumiotreats.com or message us on our facebook page.

Special flavour for mother’s day

Last year we launched our macarons with mother’s day special, which are combo with tea and floral flavoured macarons.  This year we’ve been scratching our heads to think of a new flavour specifically tailored for these special ladies.

So we selected red dates (紅棗) – an ingredient that has been used in Asian kitchens for centuries. From a western perspective, red dates are also considered a “superfood” -- they are antioxidant food that is abundant in many vitamins.


In Asian kitchens red dates are either cooked with porridge or soups, or the fruits are boiled in water for a while to infuse the flavour into the water.  The red date-flavoured water is added to desserts or served directly as drinks. For our macarons we made a red date puree and added to the white chocolate ganache filling. The puree has a hint of fruity sweetness and the red dates give the taste a bit like figs. To bring out the flavour we also made the ganache taste less sweet.

Making the red dates puree involves more work than other flavours. But for mom it’s always worth it right? ^^

Osmanthus? What is it?

Osmantus (桂花) is one of my favourite flavours, from the traditional osmanthus jelly at dim sum to the osmantus sluch at bubble tea place.  So when we’re making macarons this flavour automatically came to my mind.


Osmanthus is also called “sweet tea olive”.  The name “osmanthus” is from the Greek words of “osme” (scent) and “anthos” (flower).  As its name suggests, it’s a very fragrant flower and it’s often used in Chinese cooking, particularly used in desserts and mixed in tea.  Unlike roses, which have a sweet scent, the fragrant of osmanthus is very dense but subtle.

Osmanthus blossoms in the 8^th month of the Lunar calendar (around September) so that is also called 桂月. But of course, with the dried flower this elegant taste can be enjoyed anytime of the year ^^

Earl grey macaron – an experiment of flavour and colour

We came across this tea which has a very elegant fragrance and we decided to make some earl grey macaron. 

There’re many ways to add flavour into the macarons and the most common way is to infuse the flavour into the whipped cream used in the ganache, by putting the tea leaves in simmering cream.  We found this process didn’t yield the results we want to we tried another way – adding the tea leaves into the ganache.

Here comes the gadget we bought in the States. 

Yes, a marble mortar.  I know they’re also available in Canada but those are just not deep enough.  We bought this to make ground pistachios for the pistachio macarons.  A lot of the recipes tell you to use a coffee grinder or food processor to grind almond or other nuts but we found that will get the oil in the nuts out and make the thing too moist.  One of the solutions is to grind with powdered sugar but won’t work for macaron, which the balance of the ingredient is everything.   

And this is perfect if you just need to grind a little bit of tea leaves.  After grinding the tea leaves into a powder form, sift them to remove the bigger pieces.  We add the earl grey “powder” directly into the ganache.  Because they’re still tea leaves they won’t melt.  We got a blackish-coloured ganache just like those black sesame paste, which matched perfectly with the light purple macaron cookie. ^^ 

Let there be rose – Ispahan throwdown in Paris

We were in Paris last fall and one of our must-do was to try Pierre Hermé’s famous “Ispahan”.  Although there are numerous PE outlets in Paris this delicate pastry is only sold at the St. Germaine store.  There’s no seating in the store but there’s a park conveniently across the street. 

“Ispahan” is a species of rose so it goes without saying that this “Ispahan” dessert is of rose flavour.  It’s about the size of the palm so it’s like holding a burger when eating it (so much about elegance).  We read a lot about this before so we knew exactly what it is made of: rose flavour macaron, raspberry buttercream, lychee and fresh raspberries.  However, actually tasting it is a totally different experience – the complex aroma was just breathe-taking.  The subtle rose flavour mixed very well with the fruitiness of raspberries.  And the hint of lychee was just the perfect highlight of the dessert.  No wonder people say Pierre Hermé is a genius.

Pierre Hermé started off at another renowned patisserie Ladurée, where he created this gem.  Apparently there’s no such thing as intellectual property rights in the dessert world and there are many places in Paris you can get Ispahan, including Ladurée of course.  So our “try Pierre Hermé Ispahan” mission became an Ispahan throwdown.

Our second stop was Ladurée.  Unlike PE you can get Isaphan at all locations (unless they’re sold out).  This one tasted much like PE’s actually.  But we still like PE’s more, probably due to first mover advantage so this Ladurée one didn’t give us the wow factor anymore.

The other place we tried was Angelina.  We were there for the hot chocolate and Mont Blanc but we spotted it while waiting in line to be seated.  They’re not called Ispahan but some French name we couldn’t pronounce so we called it Ispahan anyway.  Hope they were not offended.

This one was our least favourite.  As you can see there were sprinkles of licorice and it did have taste of licorice.  We are not big fans of licorice so this Ispahan to us was an acquired taste.

The conclusion?  When we get the chance, make sure you try it and let the roses blossom in your mouth!