The Chocolate Kiss

by Laura Florand

  There was an attempt to create a ring out of choux, filled with cream. There was a chocolate and lavender macaron whose center had been cut out, but he didn’t like it, because where was he supposed to put the honey? There was a gorgeous, ring-shaped Paris-Brest, its whipped cream flavored with rose, and the powdered sugar on the top scattered with rose petals, and a pack of raspberries sitting next to it because he couldn’t make up his mind whether scattering those around the rim was a good idea or not. There was a dark, dense chocolate creation he was currently easing free of its ring-shaped mold. He had flour in his hair and a streak of chocolate across his cheek.

  And, of course, no one had the presence of mind to lock his sister out, so she came waddling in on him. And stopped. “Philippe, what are you—”

  He gave her a harassed look. “I can’t decide which one to give her.”

  “Oh, my God!!” Noémie’s voice rose to a shriek he hadn’t heard since their cowboy-and-Indian days. She grabbed her belly as if the baby had just given her a double-kick. “Are you—is this—ooh-la-la! Is it the girl you brought to Océane’s party? Does Maman know? Ooh-la-la-la-la-la-la—where’s my camera?”

  She whipped out her phone and took a whole series of pictures of her brother looking growly and rather desperate, ring-shaped pastries strewn all around him.

  “Don’t you need to go have a baby or something?” he grumbled.

  “Don’t be a bastard, Philippe. She’s not due for another two months. You always look fatter on the second one. Ha. As you’ll find out!” his sister chortled in giddy triumph. “Is it that girl, Magalie? When are you going to tell her? If Maman knows and hasn’t told me—”

  Olivier, passing, whispered something into her ear, which was a shame, because it was really hard to find talent like his, and now Philippe was going to have to fire him.

  Noémie clamped both hands over her mouth and then back over her belly. “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! Maman’s been printing up all the blog posts for her scrapbook.”

  Olivier, looking past her toward the door, made a sudden movement that sloshed crème anglaise from his pot over both him and Noémie’s belly. Fortunately the crème was no longer hot, but while Olivier was busy cursing and apologizing, Philippe froze, caught by Magalie walking in.

  “Bonjour,” she said, looking surprisingly shy, for her. She probably didn’t know how to make a peaceful entrance into his laboratoire. She was so used to storming it.

  She walked toward him, and Olivier was too busy dabbing Noémie’s belly for either of them to be useful and body-block her, and the intern over near the door lacked the sense of authority.

  Philippe straightened slowly, his hands leaving prints in the powdered sugar on the counter. With nothing left to wear but his pride, he might as well drape that around him as best he could.

  He watched her as she took in the counter. For the best pâtissier in the world, it made a pathetic spectacle.

  “I’m still working on it,” he ground out. Whatever he came up with would have been perfect when he was done.

  She stood still, staring at it. Until she blinked. Then blinked again. Then brought her hand up to her mouth and blinked several times in rapid succession. “All of this is for me?”

  Putain, she was crying. With Noémie and Olivier blocking his route to her, he didn’t have much choice but to reach out and pick her up by her shoulders, hauling her across the counter, dragging her sleek black pants in the sugar.

  She buried her face in his pastry jacket, which—this was Magalie. Crying into his chest in public.

  Beyond her, his sister gave him two thumbs energetically up. Then she pumped one fist into the opposite palm and raised it in victory. Olivier had to dodge back to avoid an elbow. The chef was grinning and trying to look discreetly away, but his head kept turning back to them.

  Magalie stood on tiptoe. “I really do love you, you know,” she whispered into his ear.

  “Don’t say anything yet,” he interrupted hastily, putting his hand over her mouth. “This isn’t ready. I can do a lot better than this.”

  She lifted up a pale brown box with a witch stamped on it and opened it. Inside was a chocolate witch with an orange-peel broomstick. Caught on the broomstick was a man’s wedding band.

  Philippe fell back and hit the counter behind him. He scrambled for a grip on it, trying to get the damn counter to stop swaying and become solid marble again like it was supposed to.

  The ring was a wide, strong band that looked like two tones of silver but was probably white gold—what did he know about actual metal rings? He had been focusing on saying it the way he did best, with pastries. She had placed her real ring there while molding the witch so that chocolate had hardened over part of it, so that he would have to eat the chocolate off it, even suck the last remnants of it clean, to get the ring.

  Brown eyes gazed up at him. “I actually think I might trust you, with me.”

  Oh, good God, he was going to cry. In front of his own kitchen.

  Dimly, he was aware of cheers and hoots and clapping. And a flash. His sister and her damn camera.

  “More or less,” Magalie said. “I’m still going to keep an eye on you.”

  He started to laugh a little. Happiness was burbling up in him like a spring, and it had to go somewhere. He was damn well not crying in front of his chefs. “Magalie, I can’t conceive how anyone could not leave you a space.”

  “And we live in my apartment until I get sick of sharing such a small space with such an arrogant man and am ready to move.”

  One side of his mouth kicked up. “That might not take very long, Magalie.”

  “It will be at my pace,” she told him severely.

  He took one of her hands from the box and kissed the inside of her wrist. Then kissed the other wrist, nudging the box a little with his chin to find the most vulnerable spot on her skin. His sister’s camera flashed again.

  “So does that mean yes?” Magalie asked carefully.

  He looked up from her wrists into her wide, watching eyes. “Was there a question?”

  From the sidelines, his sister gave him a boo. Magalie narrowed those brown eyes.

  “God, yes, Magalie,” he said. “I told you once I would probably give you anything you asked me for. You don’t even have to ask in words.”

  Chapter 38

  Philippe was sitting cross-legged on the grass, with Océane using him as gymnastics equipment—climbing on his shoulders, clasping them with her legs, and tumbling backward off them into the grass, to climb back up and start again—while people milled everywhere. The wedding was huge; there had been no other way to do it, between their families, their friends, the professional contacts that were like friends, and pretty much the entire island, ever since that party.

  He had been surprised, given his impression of Magalie as a solitary person, to realize exactly how many friends she did have, in her all-barriers-up way. Madame Fernand was there, and Claire-Lucy with Grégory. Aimée and Olivier had each come separately, but they seemed to be hitting it off pretty well. Sylvain had done some chocolate sculptures for Philippe’s wedding in his turn, and Cade had come with him. Several people were talking to the busker who had played her violin for Magalie’s entrance, urging her to consider auditioning for something professional. Philippe noticed that Cade, who had probably seen the busker perform in concert at some point just as he had, for two-hundred-euro tickets, was discreetly silent. The violinist, at least, had not come with a partner, something about which Geneviève had expressed strong relief. “Magalie was sublimating so much of her battle with you into that chocolate of hers, I was afraid we were going to get a reputation as matchmakers. And it’s hard to get rid of something like that.”

  Christophe had managed to wiggle his way in, which Philippe had only realized when he was waiting at the altar, heart beating so hard he could barely stand, scanning the audience to try to give himself something steadying. And you couldn’t really pause your own wedding to go
strangle an old imagined rival, especially when he had some pretty blonde hanging on his arm, so he had had to let it go.

  He was still bemused by how tall Magalie’s mother was. Geneviève’s size maybe should have given him a hint, but—he looked at Magalie again. No wonder she was obsessed with heels. Her mother was as tall as his own, albeit black-haired and brown-eyed like Magalie. Her aunt was nearly as tall as he was himself. Her father was tall, too, in a rangy way. “Was she adopted?” he asked Geneviève discreetly, puzzled. “You’re the aunt with the biological connection, right? Not Aja?”

  “Maman.” Geneviève nodded to the little black-haired woman with the wrinkled face and the fiery brown eyes who was coming out of the house with a platter of something held high above her head, apparently in the belief that this put it above everyone’s reach rather than right at their level. “Both her parents were Italian and moved here to get away from Fascism. She married an American soldier after she hid him from the Germans in a huge bed of dried lavender, where, the story is, I was conceived. My sister was always jealous of that story; she wanted to be the one conceived in lavender, she loved it so much. Our father was a big man, and my sister and I took after him. He died ten years ago. So, you see, it wasn’t entirely unprecedented, romantically speaking, when my sister fell in love with Peter amid lavender fields. She never would have imagined he wouldn’t stay.”

  “I like the story about your mother,” Philippe said, wondering if Magalie would enjoy making love at midnight amid lavender fields or whether it would waken a score of childhood issues. He kind of liked the idea, himself. He was always up for exploring new scents and textures. Maybe not on a night when they were quite so likely to be discovered by the plethora of wedding guests, though.

  “So Magalie is a throwback to her grandmother,” Geneviève explained. “Although personally I always thought that her body as a child spent all its energy putting down roots, only to have them yanked out and broken over and over again. And then as she got a little older and realized the roots weren’t going to work, her body poured all its energy into building her soul so strong and self-contained. Deep down, she never had enough energy to spare to make her body bigger.”

  Philippe looked at his wife, who had gone to help her grandmother and was now doing the exact same thing, imagining that she held the serving platter out of people’s reach, except she was doing it in a low-cut, lace, Givenchy wedding dress with long, slinky, cream-colored, feathery things spilling out like lingerie all around her calves. Which were shown off not by Givenchy boots but by strappy, glittering Givenchy sandals, since it was June in Provence.

  “Physically bigger,” he added to be precise.

  “Of course.” Geneviève nodded. “We wouldn’t have apprenticed a marshmallow. Although I think her soul’s grown about twenty sizes since having to fight you.” The big woman made a little circle with her two thumbs and index fingers, apparently indicative of Magalie’s former soul, and then spread her arms out until she accidentally thumped Philippe in the chest. “You’re good exercise.”

  His mouth curled.“Don’t take this the wrong way, Tante Geneviève, but I really think I might like you.”

  Geneviève shrugged, indifferently. “You can like whomever you want. But this will reassure you, jeune homme. I am beginning to like you.”

  He grinned.

  “Take your effect on her chocolate. Don’t shake your head in despair over her or anything—remember she’s even younger than you—but I honestly think she didn’t really believe in her chocolate before. That she thought it was just a fun ‘let’s pretend’ when she was standing over her pots with that smile on her face, wishing herself a place in people’s lives.”

  “Is that what she was doing, wishing herself a place?”

  “Of course, it was. Isn’t that what you do, when you make your pastries? Not that she thought of it that way, of course. You could tell, with that straight back of hers and that refusal to need anybody. She just pretended she was wishing people happiness, freedom, their heads on straight, and that she didn’t care at all if they valued her or needed her. But when you showed up, she had to skip that whole pretending step and pour herself into it.”

  He gave his new aunt a searching look, genuinely curious. “Tante Geneviève, do you actually believe you three can work magic on people? Like . . . turn men into beasts?”

  Geneviève shrugged. “It depends on how much of a transformation it is. In your case . . .”

  “I know, I know.” His smile kicked all the way through him, as Magalie came across the grass toward him. “There wasn’t that far to go.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that at all,” Geneviève said reprovingly, in that tone she used for his presumptions. “Weren’t you listening to what I said about exercise? In your case, she had to stretch the full extent of her power.”

  He smiled, liking that, Magalie stretching to her full extent to get him where she wanted him.

  Océane tumbled off him and ran toward the bride, stroking the feathery skirt.

  “I notice that humility didn’t take, though, did it?” Geneviève told him dryly.

  He got to his knees at Magalie’s feet as she stopped to look down at him. She looked absolutely beautiful in that dress. She looked so happy. That she had just married him. And she looked down at him as if—as if she trusted him with herself. As if not only his but her own most wonderful dreams had come true. “You would be surprised,” he murmured.

  Author’s Note

  All the characters in this book are fictional, but the Île Saint-Louis in Paris used to contain a tiny salon de thé called La Charlotte de l’Isle that was the most incredible, magical place and was the inspiration for La Maison des Sorcières. A place of the same name as the original Charlotte de l’Isle still exists, but over time its ownership has changed hands, and all the witch and other conical hats that lined its walls are now gone. But I think I, and maybe everyone who ever walked down the Île Saint-Louis while that little shop was there, owe a huge debt of gratitude to its original owner, Sylvie Langlet, for creating that magical place. Ever since I first stopped in front of its windows and looked at its chocolate witches and bowls of crystallized mint leaves, stories have brewed in my mind and, I imagine, in many, many visitors’ minds. It is not everybody who can give so much magic to so many people.

  As for other types of magic, pastry-lovers will recognize the inspiration behind Philippe’s rose-heart macaron. The legendary Pierre Hermé’s famous Ispahan has been marking pastry-making around the world since he created it, and I would like to thank him and all the other amazing French pâtissiers and chocolatiers for helping make Paris a world of wonder.

  And I would like particularly to thank Laurent Jeannin, head chef pâtissier at the Michelin-three-star restaurant of Le Bristol and Le Chef ’s 2011 Pastry Chef of the Year, for his infinite enthusiasm, generosity, and patience with me, as he let me research the inner workings of one of the world’s top pastry kitchens. And fed me an extravagance of amazing desserts.

  It is truly a privilege to meet such exceptional people, as I write these stories.

  A Witch’s Chocolate

  (Le Chocolat Chaud d’une Sorcière)

  A recipe shared by Magalie Chaudron on the blogs A Taste of Elle and Le Gourmand

  According to our guest, Magalie Chaudron, of that magical little shop on the Île Saint-Louis, La Maison des Sorcières, chocolat chaud should change with the weather and the person drinking it, and no recipe should ever be followed to the letter, because why do you want to imitate other people? That sounds oddly humble.

  However, to get you started, Magalie has generously described her basic process for us, and we’ve added precise measurements to help out. She had never measured her ingredients before.

  1. Smile. Just a soft curve of the lips.

  2. In 2 cups (250 milliliters) whole milk,1 infuse the following ingredients for 15 minutes, keeping the temperature below scalding so that steam rises very gently fr
om the liquid but no skin forms (about 140–150°F):

  1 cinnamon stick (½ teaspoon ground cinnamon)

  1 vanilla bean, split (if you don’t have a vanilla bean, it’s probably best to leave out the vanilla altogether)

  Dash nutmeg, freshly grated (less than teaspoon); if it is not freshly grated, you might want a touch more

  3. Remove the cinnamon stick and vanilla bean, and any skin if you misjudged the temperature because you were distracted by someone like Philippe. If you prefer an even richer vanilla flavor, scrape the seeds from inside the vanilla bean into the liquid.

  4. Add 8 ounces (225 grams) high-quality dark chocolate. How dark depends on whom you are making it for, but Valrhona’s 61 percent couverture chocolate is a good place to start.2

  5. Let the chocolate sit in the milk for about 30 seconds, then whisk until smooth.

  6. Keep over low heat. When you are ready to serve, stir three times with a smile and a wish. If you wish for dreams to come true, then be prepared for upheaval. Dreams are like lions: gentle when sleepy.

  P.S. This recipe drives Philippe insane. His recipe uses a hand-selected blend of three chocolates and requires a careful lowering and raising to precise temperatures of both the milk and chocolate (separately) before blending them together into inimitable smoothness. Every time people prefer Magalie’s chocolate to his, he has to learn humility all over again.

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  Copyright © 2013 Laura Florand

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