Finally, another chocolate almond croissant challenge update!

It has been a while since I had a chocolate almond croissant. This was for two reasons:

1. Nowhere had them! I tried! I don't know if I picked places that don't have them or were just out, but man. They were scarce.

2. I decided it would be embarassing to have a heart attack at my age and that my pastry consumption should decrease.

I'll go ahead and admit that #1 was a larger factor, but #2 is how I made it ok in my head.

But finally, I found not one, but two new contenders in the past week!

The first was from Juan-les-Pins, a beach town near Cannes, where I stayed for a night with my parents when they were here last week (yup, there's a post on that coming up as well). I think the bakery was called something along the lines of "Artisan baker," so not a whole lot of information there. I could tell the instant I picked it up this croissant was too smushy for me--it felt like a wet sponge. It had a pretty good taste for the texture, and Mom, a new initiate to the chocolate-almond croissant, was quite impressed, but I really couldn't get past the texture. Good thing though, since it would be quite unfortunate if the best chocolate-almond croissant was that far from me in Montpellier!

The second recent entrant came from the bakery "up a small alley by the botanical garden, with a yellow sign." Those directions were from a classmate, who got them from someone from Montpellier she met in Sweden. That was the entire extent of the directions, yet my classmate found it, and once she gave me the directions, so did I! I guess they are good enough, despite how laughable they are at first.

The place has good chocolate chip muffins when I need a taste of American goodies (the only not good sweet things I've had here have been cookies and cheesecake, both pretty far from French pastry and I guess out of the comfort zone).  But anyway, I was in there yesterday and spied a chocolate-almond beauty. It was definitely the most covered in powdered sugar so far! It was also an interesting one. On the outside, it was too crispy, but the inside had a good texture. The taste was nothing special though, unfortunately.

As the semester draws to a close, I am beginning to conclude that there is no holy grail of chocolate-almond croissants. There are several types, and I can be in the mood for various ones, but I have not yet found The One. If I'm here next semester, I'll definitely continue the challenge, while maybe thinking of it more as a sample of the variation versus a search for the perfect specimen!