In Short: Doux Amour’s focus is on its spherical choux pastry with traditional French Craquelin crust. Their super cute creations are filled with flavoured custard cream and fashioned to look like animals with cute names to match and taste every bit as good as they look.
What do you get when you combine humble choux pastry spheres with a coloured, traditional French cookie-crumble tasting, crackly-looking craquelin crust, and imaginative decorations? You end up with Doux Amour’s Instagram-famous animal cookie puffs of course!
Opened by Carol Chung and Kevin Phan, this café started out by serving their choux pastry alongside other food items and sweets like macarons, eclairs, tarts, and other sweet delights. But, as people started to take pictures of the animal cookie puffs and posting it on Instagram, the cute choux pastry animals went viral and became an Instagram foodie sensation. Their popularity was such that Doux Amour reverted to being all about animal cookie puffs with the option of having a coffee with your pastry.
Before you even actually step into the café, you can already smell the alluring aroma of buttery pastry that draws you in from Botany Road. There are different textures and design features embedded into the interior design. With an artificial turf wall, fairy lights on one side, exposed brick wall on the other, and a warm wood paneling and marble counter area, it’s a very inviting space. There’s a function to this design as they form perfect backdrops for the animal cookie puffs to be photographed by Instagrammers, like us for example! To top it off, there are little touches like the Edison light bulbs and little terrarium gardens hanging from the ceiling, with fresh flowers adorning each quaint table.
With our trio of choux pastry, I order a flat white. Like the beautifully crafted choux pastry, my coffee is immaculately presented. A nice light roast, there’s a subtle chocolate flavour. It’s a creamy coffee, with just the perfect viscosity. Definitely a worthy partner to the pastry that sits across from me.
But what about the choux pastry itself ? Carol and Kevin have deliberately made the choux pastry as light as possible, coloured the crust to match the animal names, and made the flavours of each custard cream filling stronger and not as sweet, so that as large as it looks, you can actually finish the whole pastry, or maybe even two, without feeling guilty.
Each choux pastry creation is also given a catchy creative name. Take for example the Nutty the Nutella bear, which was given the thumbs up by little Coco and Viner Sammi. It was very hard to go wrong with two chocolate freckles for ears, and a chocolatey, nutty, creamy filling that is surprisingly not as sweet as its Nutella namesake.
If, like me, you are a lover of Matcha green tea flavours, then Macho the Green Tea Turtle is the choice for you. The slight bitter taste of Matcha hits you initially, but mixed with the creamy custard, it eventually mellows down to create a lingering flavour of the zen green tea sensation.
One of the best sellers at Doux Amour is Rosie the Rose and Lychee Pig. With red rosy crust and pink fondant ears and snout, it is filled with a fragrant rose and lychee cream. The lychee flavour on its own can be a little one-dimensional and sweet, but paired with rose flavours, it is elevated to the next level. Doux Amour has even gone the extra step of including actual bits of lychee into the cream to enhance the lychee flavours as well as to give it a unique taste and texture. No wonder Rosie the pig was Coco and Viner Sacha’s choice of pastry the moment he stepped into café and saw it in the window.
Considering the amount of attention to detail and care that has gone into designing, creating and plating this magical pastry, it’s clear that Doux Amore’s animal cookie puff is worth the trip, no matter how long. And, as you slowly savour the pastry and cream filling with each sip of delicious coffee, you can watch the world go by outside while you enjoy the whimsically decadent menagerie inside.
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