The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens

We were fortunate to have received free tickets as gifts to The Huntington...

from Caren from the Velveteria who is a member and had extra passes...

Vanille de Patisserie

After viewing the film, "Memories of a Forgotten War", [unfortunately that post will have to wait, along with my post on the Pacific Asia Museum since I ran out of blogger space for my photo files! Fuckity fk fk fk!!!! Am learning to transfer my pix to flicker!] we headed off to meet Wandering Chopsticks who was only a few minutes away. Since we were all still full from lunch at Tibet Nepal House, WC suggested a few places for either Chinese tea or French style cakes at a Chinese owned bakery. We chose the latter, which turned out to be Vanille de Patisserie in the city of San Marino. See WC's post on Vanille here and Yelp reviews here. By the way, I looked up San Marino on Wikipedia and found out that it is the 7th most expensive place to live in the U.S.! Yikes! It really is pretty there though especially with the San Gabriel Mountains providing a beautiful backdrop...

It was smallish but cute with bright yellow seating. Since all of the tables were occupied, we ended up sitting in the back patio. In addition to cakes, they also sold cookies and brownies as various teas and coffees.

The gorgeous display case....

This is what I ended up taking home, the taro (ube) cake. [update - I ate this the next day and it was one of the best taro flavored cakes I've ever had. Almost as good as Red Ribbon Bakery's ube roll cake!]

Wow! You can even custom order wedding toppers to look EXACTLY like you and your betrothed! I didn't even have a cake topper for my wedding. However, I wouldn't want a mini me coming to life at night like that African Zuni Doll with Karen Black in the mini movie, "Amelia" from the  "Trilogy of Terror"!

More cakes from the dislay case (I got this one to go for TC):

Look at that Glamor cake. I wish I got that one! Peach and banana sounds like a good combination to me.

And yet more beautiful desserts...

This is what we ordered. For the five of us, we had two orders of their Afternoon Tea at $6.99 each (which used to be $4.99 two years ago when WC first posted on Vanille).  It is basically 6 half size pieces of their regular slices served with a cup of tea of your choice. You don't get to choose the cake slices though but no matter! Every damn piece was soooo good!  Here's the first plate topped with a thin cracker dusted with powdered sugar and black sesame seeds.

This is the same plate but a different angle. The pink and green cake was red bean and green tea while the slice next to it was cappuccino. Behind that was a strawberry cake as well as a mango/red bean/green tea combo. The colors were so pretty!

Another view of the same plate...

I think this was the other plate...It had the same desserts except one had cheesecake and ours had another type of cake slice.

I really liked that red bean and green tea slice which had tiny pieces of red bean in the filling. The green tea slice in the middle was not as popular as the other flavors since it was the only kind left on both plates. I still liked it but I think we were all too full to polish everything off. The cakes here, by the way, are not overly sweet either, which is kind of nice. It's not cloyingly sweet or as cavity inducing as it looks.

Next up on our agenda...the San Gabriel Superstore!