Foix bakery creates a display of chocolate monkeys valued at 2,000 euros while considering family succession.

BarcelonaThe bell clappers of the Sant Vicenç church strike twelve noon on a Friday, while at the Foix bakery (c. Major de Sarrià), the locals gather around the window displaying three monkeys, one giant and two small, with bananas and cocoa beans, all made of cocoa. If someone wanted to buy the entire window display, including the figures and decorations, they would have to pay 2,000 euros.

Pastry chef Joe Moretones (Barcelona, ​​​​1978) explains to me. He gave up his industrial engineering habit for cooking and pastry making, which he learned at the Hofmann school, with teachers such as Èric Ortuño from L'Atelier de Barcelona. "I made stagier at Compartir in Cadaqués, and I worked as a contracted cook in the early years of Disfrutar in Barcelona," says Moretones. After working at the best restaurant in the world, he returned to Hofmann, but as a contracted teacher, and that's when he turned to his passion for sweets. Just as this year he thought of making a monkey. "It all came about because I remembered that in 2017 I had made some drawings of monkeys, which stood on all fours on the ground, and we even did it for the Hofmann window," he says.

This year, he recovered the sketches, which he had in a notebook, and changed the design. He had him standing, with one hand like a handle, touching his waist, and the other extended, with his fingers clearly visible, holding a chocolate egg. "I thought of this monkey based on Donkey Kong, a video game character, and if you look at the face, you'll see they're very similar," he says. Everything can be made in chocolate, or almost everything, but above all, imagining it all requires many hours of work. The forty-centimeter monkey, which won him the competition organized by the communications agency Mr. and Mrs. Cake, required two days of work, twenty hours each. "It was the first time I'd done it, and what's more, I made the figure from chocolate eggs, which took up to sixty." In fact, the tradition of chocolate monas in our country is just as he explains: the figures are made from chocolate eggs, which he continues to work on. "I don't consider myself a sculptor, but I do it with the help of a spatula, and I like it, and I especially had a good time sculpting the monkey's face, which I wanted to be expressive."

The winning monkey, forty centimeters tall and weighing three kilos, emerged as the winner in the chocolate mona category, and this Easter, Foix's bakery will sell a total of four identical ones. "They've already been ordered and sold, and the price per one is 450 euros." With this success, he's already set about making ten more, but they'll be simpler, with smaller breasts, shorter height, and will cost slightly less. Other very different prices are those of the monkeys displayed in the window on Carrer Major in Sarrià. There are three in total, and they come in different sizes, and anyone who wants the entire window display, which has been sold in previous years, will have to pay 2,000 euros. "There's also the option of buying them separately; the large one costs 1,000 euros and the two small ones, 700 euros each," explains the baker, who adds that the mona are not colored and are all made of chocolate: white, toasted white, milk chocolate, and dark chocolate. "With these combinations I have created tones and shades," he reveals.

Listening at his side, very attentively, was the owner of the bakery, Jordi Madern Mas, a relative of the poet who sang "sol y de luto, y con vetusta gonella," JV Foix. "The poet JV Foix's mother was the sister of my mother's father," he explains to me so I understand their relationship. There are portraits of JV Foix's parents in the bakery, and a sculpture of the poet, with a rose beside it, in the second bakery, in Plaça de Sarrià, the one Jordi Madern says the poet opened for his sister to run. The owner keeps family memories alive, and when he talks about the family succession, about who will continue the bakeries when he retires, he states that his only son won't. Nor will his grandchildren. "I have a nephew in the bakery who might be interested, but I don't know, either," he explains.

Be that as it may, now is the time for monas. The chocolate ones are the big winners. But there are also others that deserve to be highlighted, the crunchy ones, which are unique, and Madern assures us that they are "very traditional." The pastry chef who creates the most important Foix campaigns of the year, Joe Moretones, is thinking about other creations once Easter is over. "Since I've worked the last two summers in Ciutadella de Menorca, at Herbera Bakery, I thought about making an ensaimada-panettone, a mixture of the two doughs, which has been named... ensaimattone". The sweet that is an ensaimada on the outside and too much panettone on the inside was born in Menorca. Instead of butter, it has pork fat. "I've also made it at Foix, and I also sold it in a pop-up that I did at the Cal Jan bakery in Torredebarra," says the pastry chef. It's clear that, when the time for monas is over, we'll dream of trying the ensaimatonas. It won't be because of good sweets that they become an excuse to go to bakeries.