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I wasn’t able to grab some treats during Toronto’s Macaron Day, but here is the box of macarons I bought for a friend’s birthday back in February. I usually head to Nadège to satisfy my craving for this cute confectionary, so this time around I tried something different and stopped by Petite Thuet on Yonge Street to see how theirs measured up to my regular pâtisserie.

It’s clear how differently they brand themselves from Nadège just by taking one step inside the store. At Petite Thuet I saw breads inside baskets, a shelf stocked with jars of jam and a casually-dressed person behind the wooden counter. While Nadège could be described as minimal, sharp, and very high-end, Petite Thuet lies at the other end of the spectrum with words like rustic and laid-back coming to mind.

As for the macarons themselves, I found Petite Thuet’s to be a bit larger, contained more ganache, and had more food colouring than its counterpart. When I opened the box after a long and bumpy bus ride home, half of the treats from Nadège had cracked shells (see photo #7). Now this could be entirely my fault for not carrying them horizontally or as carefully as I should have, but it was still a very disappointing thing to see.

They also had an inconsistent amount of filling, which you can compare between photo #2 and #6, the latter of which shows an orange macaron with practically no ganache to separate the two shells. Was this another result of the bumpy bus ride home? Should the blame lie on the baker at this location? I honestly don’t know. So let’s move on to what matters most: the taste!

As I said before, this box of Nadège macarons was a gift, meaning I didn’t get to taste any of them. But from previous visits to Nadège, I can confidently say that their Rosewater macaron wins against the version at Petite Thuet, which was much too sweet with the unnecessary pink sugar sprinkled on the shell and which made me feel as if I was eating perfume—blech! The brown hazelnut macaron was lovely, though it tasted like it had a bit of coffee flavour in it? That was confusing.

The ultimate test came down to the pistachio macaron, my all-time favourite flavour. I definitely prefer the light green colouring on Nadège’s pistachio macarons but since there was a larger volume of ganache and meringue on the macaron I bought from Petite Thuet, I’d have to go with theirs.

I could go on and on about macarons but this blog post would become longer than that english essay I have to finish by next Tuesday, so I’ll end it here. I still plan to try Petite Thuet’s salted caramel macaron which I keep reading about, as well as Nadège’s nine other macaron flavours so this isn’t the last you’ll see from them.

ALL PHOTOS © HAZEL LLANES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

For my Communication Design 1 class, we were asked to design a new logo for Spirit Tree Estate Cidery as well as develop a set of branding standards/guidelines for the labels of four of their products by redesigning them.

The logo (click images to get a closer look) shows an apple and a droplet of apple cider, which is what this company is known for. I made a subtle reference to the “spirit trees” by creating a tree bark line design that would unify the set of labels. They’re a fairly new company so I didn’t want to have the labels appear too traditional but I also wanted a “local homegrown farm” feel so I chose the typeface Caecilia in two weights and Clarendon for the wordmark.

Instead of purchasing stock photos, I went and took some of my own. So what you see here are the croutons, bread and apple juice (which looked close enough to cider) that came right out of my own pantry!
We didn’t have any apple sauce at home and I didn’t want to buy a jar of it that no one in my family would eat, so I ended up making my own homemade sauce with some apples lying around. Turns out they’re not that hard to make! I used this recipe.

I was actually really surprised at how well my photos turned out! Special thanks goes out to Justin Buenaflor for lending me his DSLR.

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