The Korean bakery chain Paris Baguette has become widely popular across the country and internationally, with around 4,500 stores open worldwide. Offering high-quality pastries, cakes and drinks, the bakery provides both an aesthetic and flavorful appeal with its homemade delicacies. The brand unveiled its fall menu on Aug. 20, featuring a variety of pumpkin, Biscoff and pecan flavors. Complementing these fall additions, on Oct. 1, Paris Baguette announced its Halloween menu, including two doughnuts and two cakes decorated with spiders, ghosts and worms. We visited the downtown Nashville, Tennessee location to try out a few of these fall and Halloween desserts and let you know what to try this spooky season.
Pumpkin pie custard tart
Rating: 9/10
This tart provides exactly what you think it will — a sweet, festively orange pastry that will satisfy your pumpkin pie desires. The custard filling has the perfect eggy texture, making it rich, smooth and lighter than a traditional pumpkin pie. With a strong pumpkin spice flavor, this is a perfect sweet treat for the fall months. The powdered sugar covering half of the tart felt a bit unnecessary and more like an appeal to the visual rather than an addition to the tart’s sweetness or flavor. The crust, however, is very nicely done. Flaky and buttery, it provides a wonderful texture contrast with the smooth custard filling. This pastry does a great job drawing on the appeal of a classic pumpkin pie, with some slight modifications.
Spider mochi doughnut
Rating: 8/10
The spider mochi doughnut is the cutest item on this list. It is a traditional mochi doughnut with cookies and cream frosting and an Oreo in the center. The frosting eyes on the Oreo and the chocolate drizzle over the doughnut form the spider decoration. The doughnut itself is chewy but has a light and airy feeling in the mouth. The dough is not very sweet; it’s more about the textural experience and fun of pulling the dough apart section by section rather than the flavor. However, the frosting adds the needed sweetness to the dessert. While its cookies and cream flavor is faint, the chocolate drizzle flavor comes through strongly. Overall, the spider mochi doughnut is not particularly creative. It tastes like any other mochi doughnut but is still an enjoyable treat with a cute Halloween aesthetic.
Maple pecan pastry
Rating: 6.5/10
This pastry is sticky-sweet. The overwhelming flavors are maple and sugar, due to the pastry filling. If you like maple, you will likely enjoy this dessert. The crust is perfectly flaky and crispy, making the textural experience pleasant. The pastry is topped with candied pecans and a syrupy coating, which gives it a sticky feel on the hands and in the mouth. The pecan flavor is notably absent from the actual body of the dessert, only coming in when you happen to crunch down on one of the topping pieces. It may be difficult to finish the entire pastry due to how excessively sweet it is, but pairing it with a cup of coffee may help balance the sweetness.
Dirt & worms king cream doughnut
Rating: 5/10
With an Oreo-crumble coating and cookies and cream-flavored filling, this doughnut is perfect for any fans of a cookies and cream flavor. The crumble coating and gummy worm decoration give this treat a cute Halloween look. The cream filling is definitely the highlight of this doughnut. Very light, airy and not overly sweet, it provides a nice balance with the rest of the flavors. The pastry itself is on the denser side, making it feel more filling than fluffy. Unfortunately, the Oreo-crumble coating felt a bit too thick and too sweet, forming a hard shell on top of the doughnut that doesn’t quite work. While the cookies and cream flavor is definitely there, the overall experience turns out to be a bit messy and uneven.
