She’s one of the most influential chocolatiers and pastry chefs on the planet. She’s headed judging panels at culinary Olympics and won plenty of medals in competitions herself around the world. Yet here is Australia’s queen of chocolate, hardened pastry professional Kirsten Tibballs, welling up again as she tells me about the cake that was so beautiful, so fine, it made her cry.

Unsurprisingly, that cake was in Paris – the home of many a great pâtisserie. And a couple of months later I’m there. The irony, given that for the first time in my life I’m travelling with only hand luggage for four weeks around Europe, is that to get to the cakes I have to first make it through an exhibition of the most glamorous luggage it is possible to imagine.

The cakes are from a café attached to the retrospective of Louis Vuitton’s original work as the maker of fine trunks back when travel for the rich and titled meant taking the kitchen sink with you. There are trunks that accommodate ballgowns and others designed for the 30 pairs of shoes you’d need on the steam train or ocean liner and for the subsequent seasons on the continent. There are portmanteaux filled with tortoiseshell brushes and brass-topped bottles and pots for hair unctions and pomades, required by any self-respecting gentleman or gentlewoman on safari or campaign. No wonder expeditions back in the day came with luggage trains of oxen or camels. While now more famous for signature handbags, the spirit of Louis Vuitton’s original work is still there in a current golf trunk that fits not just 14 clubs, balls and tees but everything else you might need such as a roll-out putting green for sneaky, late-night practice in your suite.

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Up a flight of stairs at the end of this exhibition is a long space lined with greenery that looks out over the Seine and the Pont Neuf. Here, one of Paris’s hottest pastry chefs, Maxime Frédéric (whose CV reads like the best of French haute cuisine – Alain Ducasse, Yannick Alléno, Cédric Grolet), has crafted a suite of six pastries that slyly nod to the iconography of the Louis Vuitton brand.

Prettiest is a raspberry tart that references the brand’s famous Damier checkerboard design in the shortcrust pastry. It’s bright, the filling tart, the pastry supremely buttery, like a super-vibrant strawberry shortcake. It’s wonderful. Other pieces reference the famous Louis Vuitton monogram as well as the signature floral pattern created by Georges Vuitton. This is embossed all over an intense tub of three different chocolates – from Peru, Vietnam and Madagascar – that is too much for me but would wow any hardcore chocoholic. It’s the same with decadent hot chocolate and the signature chocolate éclair. I feel my eyes cross when I taste them and they are pushed away unfinished.

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The long meringue fingers that encase the lightly stewed peaches and creamy vanilla mousse of the peach Charlotte are similarly branded. It would all seem a little too much without the elegance and lightness of Frédéric’s work. Like all these pastries, this is more like a fancy dessert but is summer on a plate. I can almost hear the bees buzzing and the curling leaves of Montreuil’s old walled peach orchards rustling in a warm July breeze. We are in Paris and I’m getting romantic, but amazingly they did once grow espaliered peaches in the cool climes of Montreuil 9km to the east. The remaining old limestone walls, established in the 17th century, are now a tourist attraction for keen gardeners.

As for poetry, heck, the decadent Charles Baudelaire lived just over the road from the café, writing verse and snacking on hash cakes. A line from his famous poem “L’Ínvitation au Voyage” could almost be written for the experience here: “Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté. Luxe, calme et volupté.” (There, all is order and beauty. Luxury, calm and voluptuousness.)

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So far, the raspberry tart is my standout, but I’m holding back from the last two offerings. Yes, we’ve ordered everything because I’m a professional and assiduous in my research. Okay, maybe more accurately that should read “greedy professional”. As these range in price from €16 to €22 ($26-$35) it’s more than I have ever spent on individual pastries at one time.

One of the last two little cakes, a vanilla entremet, and another, a hymn to hazelnuts, is the cake that brought Kirsten to tears. Both are beautiful, each shaped to resemble one of the flower motifs on Louis Vuitton’s handbags. Both are built around produce from Frédéric’s family farm. His grandfather was a dairyman in Normandy so there is caramelised milk on top of the complex layering of the flavours of three different vanillas – from Tahiti, Mauritius Madagascar – in the mousse-covered cake. It’s again airy-light but the different complexions of each pod give an intensity of flavour that means it’s no shrinking violet, but it’s the hazelnut one made with nuts from the family farm that had it all. A hit of salt to play against the sweetness, layers of crémeux and cake under the smooth froth of the mousse encasing it and dribbling down the cut face, a hazelnut praline that deserves a love ballad all of its own. It’s perfect and I can see why it moved Kirsten so. It is all so in balance, understated in its elegance, and perfect in execution, but with a family story that would move Victor Hugo. In short, it was very, very good.

Walking back to the hotel we pull into Pierre Hermé where they make what are considered the best macarons in the world. My favourite Parisienne sweet treats… until now.

This article originally appeared on escape.com.au. It was published here with permission.

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