Pascal Konditori CC Vest

A takeaway pastry counter inside CC Vest

This branch is built for carrying things out. Set inside the CC Vest centre at Lilleaker, it works as a retail case rather than a room to sit in: cakes, chocolate, macarons and pastries, chosen and boxed and taken elsewhere. That makes it a different proposition from the older Pascal addresses in central Oslo, which run coffee bars and light lunch service alongside the pastry. Here the transaction is the visit. The brand behind it was started by Pascal Dubuy, who opened the first Pascal konditori in Oslo in 1995, and the French pastry vocabulary he brought with him still governs how the cakes are finished and how the counter is arranged. It is a Relais Desserts member boutique.

Cakes with names, and chocolate as a gift

The whole cakes are the anchor. Hvit drøm, Feuilletine, Tutti Frutti Chocovanille and a raspberry cake with a chocolate heart are among the pieces Pascal puts its name to, and they are the reason to walk in with an occasion in mind rather than an appetite. Macarons and petits fours cover the smaller end, sold loose or in boxes, and they are the easiest thing to hand over to someone else. Chocolate is treated as a gift category in its own right here, moulded into figures and shapes as often as it is sold as plain confectionery. Wedding cakes belong to the wider Pascal programme, decorated by hand with macarons, hearts and fresh roses, and they are ordered rather than picked off a shelf. That side of the business explains the scale of the cake display relative to the size of the counter.

What to walk out with

Match the purchase to the reason for it. For a table that evening, take a whole cake and let the name do the choosing: Hvit drøm and Feuilletine sit at the classical end, Tutti Frutti Chocovanille at the brighter one. For something to hand over, a box of macarons is the neatest answer and survives a walk through a shopping centre better than a cream cake will. For a child, the moulded chocolate figures are the obvious pick. What this branch is not is a bakery for daily bread or a café for lunch, so plan the stop as a dessert errand and do the eating somewhere else. What arrives in the box will hold its finish until you get there.