Le Meridien Gurgaon showcased éclairs and coffee with funky flavours to GurgaonMoms.
What’s in a éclair? Chocolate and more chocolate, you say. But try telling that to the chefs at le Meridien Gurgaon and the answers you get will be simply amazing: masala tea, saunf , cheese, Old Monk rum… It started with Le Meridien’s Pastry Chef Johnny Luzzini’s who visited India and after experimenting with local flavours created an éclair using Darjeeling Tea, saunf, coconut flakes to create a uniquely flavoured éclair.
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Le Meridien Gurgaon hosted a week-long coffee and éclair festival at the Longitudinal Bar. The creative chef and baristas made not only éclairs with exotic flavours but coffees with a twist too and some coffee based cocktails. The showcase éclair was the Darjeeling Express, which had a filled of Darjeeling tea infused ganache filled inside the choux pastry base of the éclair topped off with white chocolate and decorated with regular fennel, coloured saunf, and thin wafers of copra.
The other flavours included masala chai, lavender cheese, Old Monk to name a few. To go along with the éclairs were a series of brewed coffees. A group of GurgaonMoms were invited to taste these delicious treats. The evening began with shots of cold coffee in flavours like cardamom coffee and a coffee lassi. The Executive Pastry Chef Anil Kumar gave a demo of how to make their classic Darjeeling Express. GurgaonMoms had fun learning to make the éclair and used their own inventiveness to decorate the éclairs.
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The hotel’s barista, Mamta, then showed us how to make patterns on coffee, the kind you see at coffee shops. Mostly, we learnt it’s all in the pouring. The way you tilt the milk jug to pour into the espresso makes the patterns from hearts to lion faces and leaves.
The evening ended with the bartender showcasing three cocktails: a coffee martini, a whisky and coffee mix and a coffee and toffee liqueur cocktail.
The take away from the evening: there’s nothing to stop you from getting creative with your ingredients from the kitchen. So go ahead and try making something unique in your kitchen too.
