The Chocolate-Brownie Crossovers - Henri Charpentier's Assorted Pastries and Quolofune's Novotile

Crossover 1 - Henri Charpentier

Apparently the top French patisserie brand in Japan, Henri Charpentier opened a branch in Singapore in October 2014, so I managed to acquire this box of assorted pastries.

While it spans an interesting gamut of pastries, from strawberry sable to speculoos to cheese cookies, I found the chocolat noir especially interesting. It's a mix between a piece of chocolate and a brownie. Essentially, it tastes very chocolatey, but has a slightly cakey texture. I tried to take a close-up of the tasty morsel, so you can (hopefully) see that it also looks somewhere between a chocolate and a fudge brownie.

They also had the white chocolate version (chocolat blanc), which was equally good and creamy. It's the one diagonally opposite the chocolat noir piece in the first picture.

Crossover 2 - Quolofune Novotile

Quolofune is the same brand behind the castella rusk that I'd featured previously. They also had this product called "Novotile", which was similar to this Henri Charpentier product... in fact, the first time I'd tried a chocolate-brownie crossover was with Novotile.

Between Quolofune and Charpentier, the latter was smoother and more chocolate-like. Charpentier's was also of higher quality... the chocolatey taste was closer to high quality chocolate, whereas Novotile's was reminiscent of the cheap Japanese chocolates which use vegetable oil. So Charpentier really did live up to its reputation in this case.

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Finally, just wanted to feature another favourite from the Charpentier box... which is the piece called "praline". It's basically a hazelnut-flavoured sponge cake or madeleine, filled with a glob of praline cream - a really unique and pleasant combination!

So from my experience, Henri Charpentier has totally lived up to its mission "to create sweets that bring joy with a touch of surprise"!