No rendezvous on the Champs-Elysées is complete without a stop at my favourite "fabricant de douceurs & gourmandies": Ladurée, in all its gilded grandeur.
In the early 1900s, Pierre Desfontaines, cousin of Ladurée's founder, Louis Ernest Ladurée, took two almond meringue cookies and joined them with a divine ganache filling - creating the macaron as we know it. Prior to that, macarons were simply cookies, first brought to France in 1533.
