This text is part of the special Plaisirs booklet
Halloween and its anthology of candies and chocolates remind us every year… how much we love sugar! Can diets and dentists fight against this irresistible sweetness that takes us straight back to our childhood? The smell of caramel that emanated from the cooking of our mothers and grandmothers. Our very first bite of sugar or apple pie. Or, that thrill of pleasure when biting into marshmallows, sour candies, a chocolate bar or Vachon cupcakes. It is precisely on these sweet memories that the pastry chef Rémy Couture has built his creative universe made of donuts and desserts, each more deliciously playful and indecent than the last. A universe that he makes us know, with the humor that we know him, through the cookbook Do you want dessert? Here it is!, a vibrant and colorful tribute to the sweets of the eternal children that we are.
Rémy, what personal relationship do you have with desserts?
Huge question! I would say that it is the one of the first time, of the first taste that one develops in childhood. It’s like music, taste. It is enough to smell or eat something for memories to emerge. For my part, I was marked both by the desserts made by my mother and my grandmothers, and by the popular industrial pastries that we bought, such as Vachon cakes and Leclerc cookies. It is in these references that I recognize myself… as well as my waist size! So when I saw that my customers from Crémy were much more hooked on these desserts than on the gourmet ones I was offering at the start, I decided to go all out on this path.
How to present Crémy’s desserts?
These are assumed desserts. When people come to Crémy, they want to eat a good dessert without guilt, like they did when they were children. Yes, my donuts are big and high in calories. And all my creations could be summed up as: “lots of butter, lots of sugar, but it’s good”. We all need to have fun, so we might as well do it with good quality products.
Is nostalgia your trademark?
Yes this is my thrill, I like to play with it. My desserts, uniforms, packaging, everything at Crémy starts from there. As a child, for example, I was so impressed with my visit to the Vachon cake factory that I decided to reproduce the May West (renamed the Rem West) in my own way, by wrapping them in small bags too. plastics inside a cardboard box. It is also for this reason that my book is full of nods to the past. I asked my mother for her 1980s bowl in which she made her unemployed pudding. I also unearthed the must-have brown electric knife that all families had at that time. And all the recipes from Do you want dessert? are references to my own childhood.
What are the desserts that have marked you the most and which are found in this book?
There are a lot of them, but I would say my grandmother Claire’s granola bars (see sidebar recipe) were arguably the desserts I ate the most when I was young. I remember she produced and froze tons of it in her four freezer tombs in the basement. And although she always had boxes of them in the kitchen, we loved them so much that we even devoured them frozen! I also remember the way my sister and I ate our Ah, caramel (the little caramel cakes in the book). We started with the cake, then we freeze the icing and buttercream part to enjoy them very cold. As for the Whippets (now Oui-Pettes), I believe that all children had and still have their own way of eating them. I chipped them on top, while my sister cooked them in the microwave to eat them with a spoon.
Who says dessert, says techniques. Is it worth making your own desserts that can be found in stores?
Obviously ! First of all, because eating desserts made with good products is always better. Then because pastry making is much more accessible than you think. This is what I wanted to communicate in my book, with recipes like that of the Révels (a tribute to the Revellos) or that of the chocolate chip cookies, which have few steps and only require a quarter of hour of manual labor. I’m not asking people to make their own ice cream or puff pastry, that won’t take anything away from them. And I guarantee you that there is no greater satisfaction than having prepared a delicious dessert yourself!