Thomas, can you tell us about Minnie’s Delights pastry shop and tell us what you do here on a daily basis?
Minnie’s Delights is Disneyland Paris’ main pastry shop. We work primarily for the restaurants in the Disneyland Park and also the Walt Disney Studios Park.
This is where all the pastries are made?
Yes, most of the pastries for the resort are made here, particularly for the buffet restaurants, so Restaurant Agrabah Café and Plaza Gardens Restaurant, as well as many others. We also work for Bistrot chez Remy where all our pies are completely homemade.
How many people are in your team?
There are a good thirty or so of us, including a kitchen porter, a weekend kitchen porter, a kitchen steward, a storekeeper, and a delivery man because this is the main pastry shop, so we have a delivery system for sending the desserts. There are also the different pastry chefs, assistant, demi, chef de parti and sous chef pastry chefs and Benoit, the chef.
What does a typical day look like at Minnie’s Delights?
If I’m in the morning, I start at 6 a.m. so I open the shop; I’m the first to arrive, I turn everything on. I welcome first Cast Members for the morning shift around 6:10 a.m. So their job is basically to make the finishing touches, for example, to desserts that need to be decorated before being delivered one or two hours later. The rest of the team arrives from 8 a.m./9 a.m. onwards, and that’s when we really get stuck into preparing what has to be made for the day because we make everything the day before it is needed. So what we make today will be for tomorrow.
How many pastries are made on average every day?
Currently, the output is 4 000 to 8 000 pastries per person every day.
What have you prepared at Minnie’s Delights for the Christmas season?
Here we have two marshmallow lollies in the shape of Mickey’s head in chocolate; a vanilla one coated in white chocolate and a strawberry one coated in red-colored white chocolate. We have Christmas tree-shaped gingerbread with a Christmas print on it and a Rodolphe tartlet with caramel praline.
How are these creations invented? Where is the recipe decided?
Produit Intégration Food gives us the dates of the seasons, lets us know the number of desserts needed and tells us which restaurant they want us to work for. We are pretty much free to put forward our own creations. We get the teams very much involved and afterwards we test our recipes, and of course, sometimes some things don’t work. And as soon as we are happy with the result, we present the desserts to our management which then gives approval or not, and lets us know what it wants and what we have to work, etc.