Cacao Lab
Cacao Lab is one of the cafés owned by Cacao Fine Chocolates and Patisserie. They have many cute éclairs, cakes, macarons and chocolates but we were most interested in trying their de-constructed iced chocolates. They’re served divided into three separate beakers, and then you mix them together… kind of like the lab experiments we do for our chem eng subjects, except more edible 😛
Iced Chocolate – salted caramel (~$9)
A couple of weeks ago we were looking for somewhere to eat dessert and we found ourselves in the Gânache Chocolate lounge on Collins St. Gânache has an assortment of sweet things on their menu, including cake, macarons, drinks… and of course, chocolate! We ended up getting all four of these things for a bit of variety.
Gânache chocolates, $2 each.
The chocolates we tried at Gânache included a milk chocolate snowman filled with ganache, a salted caramel dome and a milk chocolate coated paillete feuilletine with hazelnut praline. The paillete feuilletine was the best one, with a delicious hazelnut flavour and a delicate crunchiness. The other two chocolates were good, but nothing special. Continue reading
Lindt Chocolate Cafés can be found in a number of locations – we visited the one on Collins Street. We had an “Our Deal” voucher which cost $16 and included two chocolate milkshakes or hot chocolates, and five Lindt Délice (this is what they call their macarons). Lindt also recently had a voucher on Groupon for a dessert platter, so we recommend that you look online for any deals that are available before you visit a Lindt Café.
We both chose to have milkshakes rather than hot chocolates. We were able to choose the flavours of the macarons, Continue reading
Ahh Chez Dre. Such beautiful and delicious cakes. It really is worth taking a quick trip to South Melbourne just to get one of their cute petits gateaux, and their macarons are decent (though they are a bit pricey at $3 each). Unfortunately our brunch experience was a bit disappointing… the waitress forgot to put our orders through, so we ended up waiting 40 minutes for our food. She later apologised and gave us a free macaron each, which we really appreciated. However we think that maybe Chez Dre needs more staff for those really busy mornings, to avoid these kinds of mistakes. On the day we visited, they were so full that there was a whole waiting list of customers who wanted tables.
Rose-raspberry and green tea-kalamanzi macarons ($3 each)
The complimentary macarons both had really nice flavours. The green tea one had a good soft texture, but the raspberry was a bit hard and chewy. They looked quite big, but the shells had big air bubbles inside them.
Ratatouille with baked eggs, quinoa dukkah, toasted baguette and pepe saya butter (weekly special, $18.50)
Wendy ~ I expected the ratatouille to be like other baked egg dishes where the egg is baked into the tomato. When it finally arrived, I thought it wasn’t baked eggs at all Continue reading
Today we visited the Cake Bake and Sweet Show! It’s here in Melbourne’s Convention and Exhibition Centre for only three days (October 3-5) so if you haven’t been yet, tomorrow is your last chance! The show has clearly been popular this year; we arrived at 10:15 a.m. and there was already a huge queue to get in, going all the way to the other end of the building. The queue was still long when we left the show… 2 hours later.
Much queue.
Once inside the exhibition hall, we were surrounded by food stalls from all the usual suspects (LuxBite, Adriano Zumbo, N2 Gelato, Gânache etc.) as well as many other stored we hadn’t heard of before. Stalls were selling everything from ice cream to fudge, lollies and macarons; everything sweet. There were beautiful cakes, macaron towers, a chocolate cake sofa and a display of giant chocolate flowers!!
The worlds largest chocolate bouquet! – Savour Chocolate and Patisserie School
Macaron towers: Cacao (left) and Chocolette (right)
