Pastry chef brings taste of glamour to Paris

You could say that Cork pastry chef Christine O’Sullivan is having her cake and eating it too.

After all, the MasterChef Ireland finalist and her partner, Chris Wilson, have just opened their own pâtisserie and café in Paris, a city famed for its exceptional confectionery.

Their carrot cakes, cheesecakes, walnut and coconut bars, and this week’s special, an exotic square, have been selling like… well, hot cakes.

And their café, Broken Biscuits, has just been named one of the top six cosy cafés in Paris by Glamour magazine in its French edition.

“It’s been crazy,” Christine, originally from Kinsale, told the Irish Examiner. “Since we opened in mid-June, we’ve been really busy.”

“There is a real appetite for something different here,” Chris says, explaining that the name, Broken Biscuits, captures something of the couple’s desire to take familiar recipes and reinvent them.

“We want to make simple but high-quality cakes,” Christine adds, listing a mouth-watering repertoire that includes vanilla cheesecake, carrot cake, a lemon and poppy seed cake, exotic squares (with its layers of mango, pistachio, and raspberry) and a few very-French confections such as madeleines.

It’s been quite the gastronomic adventure since Christine took a year off from her architecture studies in 2011 to compete in MasterChef.

From the moment the couple opened the doors of 10 Passage Rochebrune in a quaint cobbled passageway in the 11th district of Paris, Broken Biscuits stuck a chord with Parisians.

“There’s a real sense of community here,” the couple agrees. Many of the locals have already become regulars and they trial new recipes on them.

The café has also been a hit with bloggers, on Instagram, and on Facebook. Their wholesale business continues to thrive too. The couple still supplies other Parisian cafés and caters at events.

They’ve been putting in long hours and haven’t taken a day off in months, yet they still find time for fun: there’s a picture of the two of them sack-racing in empty bags of flour outside the café. Don’t tell them it takes the biscuit — they’ve heard that too many times before.