You know how, when you were little, you’d be so excited to catch a glimpse of Santa and his elves at the mall, or to gaze into a store window sparkling with tinsel and lights, or to run through a toy department gleaming with shiny new dollhouses and Matchbox cars and, depending on the decade, Cabbage Patch Dolls or Furbies or Bratz or G.I. Joes?

Well, that’s how I feel these days whenever I walk into Thierry Chocolates on Alberni Street between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

There’s that perfume of chocolate and orange and spice lingering in the air, the sparkling light reflecting off cellophane wrappers and festive ribbons, the cases and shelves and countertops loaded with cookies and candies and tarts and cakes. It’s my happy place.

Admittedly, it’s not my only happy place come the holidays. I also feel pretty delighted when Beaucoup Bakery releases its seasonal croissants and Bad Dog Bread fills its shelves with charmingly wrapped stollen and Thomas Haas’s holiday bark makes its annual appearance.

But there’s something about the very French joie de vivre of Thierry Busset’s sweet confection of a pastry shop that makes me feel like a kid in a candy store, especially at this time of year. In large part, it’s because of Busset himself, who is French charm personified.

“What I like about the holiday, in France, it’s a time to be together with your family, and food is a big part of it,” Busset says. “In the shop, we try to recreate that moment, especially with the Christmas holiday.”

Master chocolatier and pastry chef Thierry Busset, hailed by Gordon Ramsay as “one of the finest pastry chefs in the world,” brings French holiday tradition to life with his festive pastries. Each holiday season, the pastry cases at Thierry Chocolates brim with tradition and artistry — chestnut tarts, hazelnut sablés and the showstopping bûche de Noël, a modern take on France’s most beloved festive dessert.

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Holiday classics
Busset is a master chocolatier and pastry chef who hails from the Auvergne region of France and worked in a trio of London’s most glamorous restaurants, each sparkling with three Michelin stars: Le Gavroche, Restaurant Marco Pierre White and the Oak Room. His former colleague Gordon Ramsay called him “one of the finest pastry chefs in the world.”

But in 2000 he left glittering London behind and moved to Canada, bringing his innovative skills to Toptable Group’s CinCin Ristorante + Bar and West Restaurant. A decade or so later, still under the Toptable umbrella, he opened his own pâtisserie and café on Alberni Street. That was followed by locations in Mount Pleasant (opened just in time for Christmas 2020) and Ambleside (2023). Mount Pleasant, which houses the group’s commercial kitchen, is where he spends most of his time these days; Alberni Street, though, is still his “baby.”

Year round, Thierry produces all the French classics you would expect, with some delightful twists: viennoiserie, including croissants and Danishes, as well as macarons, chocolates, cakes, tarts and pastries, including traditional millefeuille and an updated matcha blackberry éclair. He is perhaps most famous for his apple tart, a disc of puff pastry loaded with rings of finely sliced apple that caramelize gorgeously as they bake.

But come the holidays and everything kicks up a notch, or two, or 12.

“Thanksgiving is the time of year when we start gathering and carry on until Christmas,” he says. His shops gradually fill with candies and cookies and chocolates, especially the simple sweets known as mendiants, which historically represented the four monastic orders of Dominicans, Augustinians, Franciscans and Carmelites. “It’s simply a disc of chocolate with dried fruit and nuts. It’s very simple, but delicious,” he says.

Chocolate’s the charm
Chocolate, you may have gathered, is kind of Busset’s thing. “I’m not a big sweet person,” he says. “Chocolate is my go-to for sure. You don’t need to eat as much. You just need one or two pieces, if they are very good.”

He learned the chocolate arts back in France, and today makes chocolates in small batches from the highest-quality products: fresh fruits and zests, Tahitian vanilla, premium hazelnuts, Québec maple syrup and the finest chocolate. There are individual bonbons filled with luscious ganaches or pralines, as well as two chocolate bars, one of 45 per cent Ecuadorian milk chocolate and the other of 72 per cent Venezuelan dark chocolate.

The team at Thierry makes as much as possible in-house, including the ganaches, the garnishes, the pastes and pralines, the caramel and candied fruit and nuts. For instance, Busset says, “I always do my own candied orange peel.” He uses organic oranges and the entire process takes two full weeks, which is more time and labour than many pâtisseries are able to invest. At the end, though, he has enough high-quality, sustainably sourced, candied orange peel to last for a full year.

“We use it in a lot of things,” he says. Among them: chocolate-dipped orange-peel candies, chewy nougat, spiced mince pies and kugelhopf, a traditional Bundt-style cake that hails from Alsace and is made with a yeast-based dough, sliced almonds and dried, candied fruit.

Home cooks, of course, don’t need to spend two weeks making candied orange peel — you can do it in a day, and it’s well worth it because the end result won’t be hard and dry like some commercial products. Dipped in chocolate, it makes a terrific host gift and the syrup it cooks in is delicious for soaking cakes and adding to cocktails.

Chocolates, too, can be made at home, though Busset cautions against trying anything too complicated if you don’t have the professional equipment to pull it off. “When you see a recipe with a lot of components, you should get out of there. It becomes more tricky and difficult to do,” he says.

Mostly, he advises home cooks not to worry too much about trying to recreate what a trained chocolate master can do. Instead, consider a simple truffle of chocolate ganache rolled in cocoa or finely chopped nuts. And, he says, if you want to dip a cookie or piece of candied orange peel in chocolate, just melt the chocolate, dip it and pop it in the fridge to set. “Don’t worry so much about tempering. That is very hard to do at home. When you do it in your home, those details are not important. It will set enough and taste good enough,” he says.

“Not everything has to be complicated — life is complicated enough,” he adds. “Don’t think too much… just enjoy life and have a special time with your family.”

Family favourites
Family, after all, is what the holidays are all about. That, and the beloved sweets you’ll share with them.

For Busset, the holiday season starts with the appearance of his famous chestnut tart, just in time for Thanksgiving. The tart features an almond dough piled with candied chestnuts and pecans, crowned with dark chocolate shavings. There may be some rum and cognac drizzled in there, too.

“We do everything with chestnut because it’s that time of year,” he says. “People love our chestnut tarts. It’s one of my favourites, and it was my father’s favourite, too.”

Then, they bring out the cookies, the hazelnut sablés and palmiers, and, a little unusually for a French pâtisserie, the mince tarts made from a recipe Busset learned when he was at Le Gavroche, filled with dried fruit, spices, rum and cognac. “That’s very delicious. We don’t do a lot of them, that’s an English tradition.”

But the pièce de résistance, the most famous of the French holiday traditions, is the bûche de Noël.

This rolled cake, traditionally decorated to look like a forest log, with bark-like frosting and marzipan mushrooms, is a nod to the pagan traditions that existed before Christianity came along. Back in medieval times, people in northern Europe would burn a large log to celebrate yule, a festival that coincided with the solstice; the longer it burned, the greater the luck the new year would bring. By the 19th century, though, fewer homes had a giant hearth that would accommodate a big chunk of wood. And so the yule log became a cake.

There are many, many variations on the bûche de Noël, but the classic is rolled sponge filled with buttercream and covered in chocolate ganache. In Busset’s skilled hands, each year it is something beautiful and extraordinary and new. It loses the slightly kitsch ornaments and might feature chestnut bavarois with candied chestnuts and rich chocolate ganache, or a lime mousse filling and coconut sablé or a gluten-free chocolate cake with Morello cherry-whipped ganache.

The one thing he knows for sure is that your guests will love it, no matter how much turkey or prime rib they put away first. “Everyone is too full to eat it, but they want a slice anyway,” he says merrily.

Thierry
1059 Alberni St., Vancouver, 604.608.6870 | 265 East 10th Ave., Vancouver, 604.336.8689 | 1343 Bellevue Ave., Vancouver 604.912.0700
thierrychocolates.com | @thierrychocolat

CinCin Ristorante + Bar
1154 Robson St., Vancouver
cincin.net | 604.688.7338 | @cincinristorante

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Photo credit Allison Kuhl.

 All the sweet, none of the gluten 
Just around the corner from his pâtisserie is Thierry Busset’s former stomping grounds, CinCin Ristorante + Bar, where his legacy is being carried on by pastry chef Gizelle Paré.

“The holidays are a time to get together with family, relax, enjoy each other’s company and eat good food,” she says.

One thing Paré is particularly conscious of is making sure everyone around the table can share in the sweets.

“I like to be inclusive in my baking. Baked goods and sweets are celebratory in nature… they’re just pure joy and not necessary at all. I like to make sure everyone can participate in that,” she says.

That means offering gluten-free desserts that are impressive, delicious and don’t feel like penance. For home bakers, she notes that gluten-free flours have improved vastly in recently years, and that there is plenty of good instruction available on YouTube and in cookbooks such as those by Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson, owners of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco.

She advises that the trick to making a really great gluten-free bake is not to try to fully recreate something that relies on wheat flour — like, say, a sponge — with gluten-free substitutes.

Her luscious gluten-free molten chocolate cake, for instance, uses eggs as a leavener, so it doesn’t rely on the protein in flour for its structure. Similarly, her pavlova is meringue-based and gluten free, while her rich, chocolatey torta Caprese uses nut flour instead of wheat.

“Something like that is incredibly easy and delicious,” she says. “Easy, achievable, luxurious and perfect for the holiday.”

Aside from her gluten-free desserts, Paré shares Busset’s nostalgia for family favourites; in her case, it’s for alfajores, the shortbread and dulce de leche sandwich cookies of her mother’s Peruvian homeland. “That’s one that I have to make every year.”

“I’ve always been the baker in the family and that comes with big expectations for me,” she adds. These days, holiday baking for Paré means cookies, which she likes, “because you get to share so much more of it.”

Cookies, she notes, are also perfectly light little bites to enjoy after a big, rich, holiday meal. “And then you can have them for breakfast the next day,” she says.

Her other favourite indulgence is panettone, the traditional yeast-based Italian cake studded with nuts and fruit, which is even better the next day as French toast. She buys hers from local bakers such as Myra Maston of Myra Bread Bakery, Claire Livia Lassam of LIVIA, Forno e Vino or Emiddio Isernia of Antise on Carrall Street. “Christmas has to go hand in hand with panettone,” Paré says. “Panettones for sure and cookies, those are my two top holiday bakes. But trying to make panettone — forget it! It’s so hard.”