As Sanchez pipes vanilla mascarpone cream onto lime-green matcha cakes for the matcha tiramisu, one of the new spring items, he describes a recent trend in pastry that calls for manual assembly rather than the flexible silicone molds that have long been standard practice.
“Cédric Grolet uses a lot of free-hand and piping,” he says, referencing the French pastry chef who, along with Cronut-inventor Dominique Ansel, is at the top of the pastry game. (Grolet’s Instagram has over 10 million followers.) “The hand-forming provides a more human touch and differentiates between pastry chefs, as everyone uses the same molds. We’re transitioning.”
They’ve also moved toward using natural colors and flavors, and less sugar, not only in the pastries—which are fruit-forward and appreciably less sweet than other versions—but in the macarons that have been a staple at Sacré Sucré since the beginning.
That beginning was in 2011, when Sanchez and Thibodeaux first met in Hampden. Sanchez, who is from Puerto Rico and has a master’s degree in computer security from Johns Hopkins, had landed a job in Baltimore.
“Government cyber stuff,” he says. Thibodeaux,a native of Louisiana, had gone to Johnson & Wales in Rhode Island for culinary school—which is distinct, it should be said, from pastry—and was working at Mt. Washington Conference Center. “When we started living together, Dane used to cook all the time,” says Sanchez of Thibodeaux, who started cooking with his family as a child.
The pair, who married in 2015, began cooking together, making pasta and jams, and everything they ate at home was made from scratch. Shortly after they married, Sanchez took a job in Northern California. On weekends, the couple started making pastries and collecting cookbooks.
“And then we traveled to France,” says Sanchez, “and we had our first real macaron.” “In the Lyon marketplace, walking around, not even thinking about the pastries,” adds Thibodeaux. “We didn’t go there for the pastries; we went there for the wine.”
That macaron, a fig macaron, “blew us away,” says Thibodeaux, and became the catalyst for a macaron obsession—not just consuming them but learning how to make them. “We couldn’t figure out how they put figs into a macaron,” says Thibodeaux. “And that started [the questions]: What is a macaron? How do you make a macaron?”
Back in California, they started baking. “I failed like 10 times with that [first] recipe. And then it just became a challenge,” says Sanchez. “And then I started bringing them to my coworkers. I didn’t know it at the time, but they were macaron fanatics. Science and computer people, they get into certain things.” Sanchez’s co-workers not only loved the macarons, but started buying them, too.