Central New Jersey’s burgeoning bakery scene received a fresh boost in March when L’Annexe de Mamie Colette opened the doors to its brand new building on River Road in Titusville.
A good number of bakeries have opened in the past 10 years in the region, a welcome rebound for a business model that had once seemed all but eliminated by competition from supermarkets and chains.
Just in Hopewell Valley, Madame Cupcake opened in Hopewell in January 2022, and Terra Momo Bread Company opened its second location in Pennington in May 2023. Down the road in Ewing, Hamilton-based Nino’s Pastry Shop opened a second location on Scotch Road also in May of last year.
For many pastry chefs, an independent bakery is a labor of love, and such is the case for Magali and Isabelle Henry Noblanc, the married business partners behind Mamie Colette — a viennoiserie in Newtown, Pennsylvania that opened in November 2022 — and now L’Annexe.
Mamie Colette is known for its croissants and danish, which Chef Magali and staff make in house in a process that takes up to three days.
L’Annexe has croissants, too. But the new bake shop is no mere copy of the original. The focus at L’Annexe is on sweet and savory crêpes in the style of Brittany, France, as well as pastries of the kind that can be found in the city of Chartres.
L’Annexe crêpes are made with buckwheat, which is the way they are made in Brittany, known as the birthplace of crêpes. Brittany also happens to be the part of France where Isabelle spent the early part of her life.
The most popular savory crêpe since L’Annexe opened has been the egg, Swiss cheese and ham crêpe. Also popular has been the crêpe with goat cheese, fig jam, walnuts and arugula.
Sweet crêpes include one with lemon, almonds and honey, one with housemade chocolate sauce and one with salted butter caramel.
Also in the display cases are brioches, meringues and choupinettes — a choux pastry filled with different flavors of creamy pudding, such as pistachio raspberry, sea salt caramel and hazelnut praline and passionfruit.
Also setting L’Annexe apart from Mamie Colette is that it has a bread bakery onsite. Breads for sale include baguettes, multigrain buckwheat loaves and levain sourdough loaves, which Isabelle describes as a “very different sourdough — it doesn’t taste acidic or sour. It’s made the way we make it in France.”
The shop in Newtown did not have enough room to allow for bread baking, though breads made at L’Annexe now find their way to the Pennsylvania side.
“Our customers were all asking for bread, they said the croissants were great but they wanted bread as well,” Isabelle says. “Our ovens (for baking viennoiserie) are ginormous, we didn’t have enough room. So we started looking for a commercial kitchen where we could actually bake bread.”
Once the pair had decided on opening a second location, they searched first in Pennsylvania and then in New Jersey for a suitable location for the new venture. Their first thought was Lambertville, and Isabelle remembers one day driving through Titusville on the way north and seeing the building that would become L’Annexe.
“We saw the buildings and thought they were beautiful,” she says. “We thought, whoever was going to be in that location would be really lucky. Then one day we saw a ‘for lease’ sign, called and met with the owners of the building, and now we’re the lucky people who get to work there.”
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Isabelle is originally from Brittany, and Magali from Chartres. Though they met in France, Isabelle was living in the U.S. at the time, and only temporarily back in France for her job as a business development professional.
When Isabelle returned home to the U.S., Magali moved with her, and took the opportunity to leave behind her unfulfilling job as a sales executive and embark on a new career as a pastry chef. She studied bread and viennoiserie baking at l’Ecole Banette in France, and worked for several bakeries in the Netherlands, France and New Jersey honing her craft.
Croissants became her passion, and when she and Isabelle decided to open a small business of their own, they made croissants and other viennoiseries such as pain au chocolat the centerpiece of their bakery. Le Cordon Bleu, the legendary Paris-based culinary school, describes viennoiserie as “the bridge between patisserie and French bread.”
They financed the new business themselves, and named the bakery after Magali’s grandmother, Colette, a native of Guadaloupe who moved to Chartres with her six children in search of a better life. Magali says it was Colette who introduced her to baking.
Mamie Colette pastries are made in house, from scratch daily. Isabelle says they are committed to using ingredients that are preservative and chemical free.
She says that many customers have told them that they can tell the difference between their handmade croissants and those that come from other vendors, which are often made in industrial bakeries.
“Here, we wanted to introduce the real thing, show the real thing when it’s made from scratch, by hand,” Isabelle says.
While Mamie Colette and L’Annexe de Mamie Colette both rotate some of the flavors of their sweet and savory fillings, Isabelle says that the menu is generally fixed — as is the tradition in Brittany.
“In France, you go to a bakery, there’s never anything different on the menu,” she says. “You could go back one year or 10 years later, there’s the same things on the menu.”
In addition to the pastries and breads, L’Annexe also has a variety of coffee, tea and French juices for sale. Isabelle says some customers make regular stops in just for the coffee on their way to work. Though surely, there are days when they can’t quite resist getting a brioche or a crêpe to go as well.
L’Annexe de Mamie Colette, 1462 River Road, Titusville NJ. Phone: (609) 303-7595. Hours: 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesdays, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, and 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays through Sundays. Closed Mondays.
Pastries at L'Annexe de Mamie Colette, newly opened bakery in Titusville.,
