France is rightly famous for its sweets and pastries -- there are few more decadent pleasures in life then slicing into a rich, gooey fondant au chocolat or elegant tiramisu.  Still, sometimes a girl gets homesick for the treats of her youth...  Which is why, when I saw a rack of freshly-baked donuts at my local patisserie, I just had to try one.  

Big mistake.  It turns out, the French simply don't know how to make a good donut.  I’ve noticed in the past that the French have a tendency to get obsessed with certain typically American foodstuffs, and go crazy trying to reproduce them. But at each turn, it’s like they’ve only ever seen them on tv or in a magazine — they frequently produce a convincing facsimile of the outside, but totally miss the boat on innards, bottoms, taste, or texture.

But it’s not like the French are the only ones guilty of judging a pastry by its cover — I’ve noticed that Americans do the very same thing with chocolate éclairs. Americans do an excellent job reproducing the external appearance of éclairs, but for some reason they are always stuffed with white cream (or worse, whipped cream). Where did people get this idea? Because I have never encountered this in a French éclair.

In France, the outside of the éclair always tips you off to the inside: chocolate icing means chocolate cream, coffee icing means coffee cream, etc. So I hereby call on the pastry-chefs of both nations: for the love of all that’s sweet, don’t try to reproduce a confection you’ve never tasted.