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Some of your are sharper than I thought and were very, very close.

And thanks to Aude, I’ve added a new French word to my vocabulary: Nounours, or, Teddy Bear (ours means ‘bear’.)
Brian thought they were the French version of Mallomars™and he shares my passion for the little dome-like marshmallow mounds resting on a disk of graham crackers finished with an über-thin dark chocolate coating.

Luckyguess perhaps mockingly thought they were breasts, but if breasts were indeed available in a chocolate-coated variety, I suspect they’d be a lot more popular than they already are. And Pru fell for the oldest trick in the book, the ‘slide-your-cursor-over-the-blog-photo’, which effectively threw her off-track completely.

So what are they?

pariscanellesnot!blog.jpg

They’re chocolate-coated candies with a marshmallow filling, and a nubbin of hazelnut paste (a word that may send Aude to the French dictionary, as Nounours sent me to mine), all enrobed in a thin shell of delicously-dark chocolate. Each candy perfectly resembles a canellé, those little cakes from Bordeaux, baked in copper molds coated with beeswax, creating a dark, crusty shell around the eggy cake batter.
Canellés became all the rage amongst American bakers a few years back, but they’re difficult to bake correctly (…and before you get your panties in a knot about how I’ve spelled canellés, there’s a few different ways to spell them.)

When you find one, a good canellé will be very good indeed…but a well-made one is indeed rarly encountered (there’s a kiosk in the gare Montparnasse in Paris which sells terrific canellés direct from Bordeaux). The best have a hard, tough outer-coating, yielding to a soft, rich, vanilla-scented center that’s eggy and pillow-soft.

When I spotted these in the confectionary shop, the proprietor excited told me all about them…but in such rapid-fire French, that although her enthusiam had become contageous, I could only comprehend about one-third of what she was saying. When I detected the word guimauve (marshmallow) jumbled in her exhaltations, I had to try them.

And luckily for me, I did!

Now I have to find those little chocolate-dipped nounours

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12 comments

    • Meg

    David, I can add another – somewhat confusing – vocabulary word. I recently made a friend of mine laugh by mixing up nounours (teddy bear) with nou-nou (nanny). Apparently I told her that finding a good teddy bear to look after the boy was proving difficult!

    Those look delish, by the way – where did you get them??

    • michele

    Hi David, they sound delicious, especially because they are filled with a nubbin of hazelnut paste :) Do tell where you found them! And when you find the chocolate dipped ones, definitely let me know!

    • Cindy

    Oh, des nounours en guimauves. That’s yummy, when young we eat lots of them, still do later but not as much. That’s delicious.

    • Judith in Umbria

    I am devastated to find these live in Paris. I always go there for art and fashion and now I must have those chocolate marshmallow thingies, too. I will be forced to wear Parisian scarves only after scarfing up those babes.

    • clotilde

    Dear David,
    Nounours can be found at any boulangerie that’s close to a school, or in bagged form, in the candy aisle of your supermarket — I favor the Champion store brand. Warning: they are incredibly addictive, and an enormous crowd-pleaser, at least among my friends! While some people will gobble them up in one fell swoop, I am a proponent of the bite-the-head-off-first strategy…

    • David

    Well, I did search them out today (I found the ‘Koala’ brand) but decided I’d better not buy them…I would certainly become addicted as well!

    • Melissa (:

    Mmmmmm! They look scrumptious!

    • Aude

    David,
    I have to check my dictionary indeed for “nubbin”! And this “cannelés” candies seem much richer than the nounours, I definitely need to try these.

    • Brett

    Between the excellent health care system and now these confoundedly alluring offspring of a jar of Nutella and a marshmellow (dressed up as a Canellé, perhaps for some pre-Halloween costume party?),I really see no reason not to live in Paris (or at least visit). The French tourism board should be paying you to post these pictures.

    • Deborah

    These sound really good! I really like the idea of the combination of the chocalte marshmallow and hazelnut paste. I am going to try to make these myself (I always do this, find something that I like and then try to recreate it myself). Maybe I could make mine look like Peeps.

    • Grommie

    You can make your own chocolate breasts with these:
    http://www.candyplus.net/adultmolds3.html
    I thought it was especially hysterical that the link for religious candy molds was next to the photo of the mold for the chocolate breasts.

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