Manga / Yumeiro Pâtissière

"Won't you have some of my dream-colored sweets?"

—Ichigo's On The Next Episode Of Catchphrase

Yumeiro Pâtissière (Dream-Colored Pâtissière) is a shoujo manga by Natsumi Matsumoto which was serialized in Ribon magazine from 2008 to 2011. An anime adaptation aired from 2009 to 2010.

Clumsy junior-high student Amano Ichigo has never been good at anything. Her younger sister Natsume has all the talent in the family. But Ichigo loves cakes, or eating them, at least. Sweets can make people smile, even when they're feeling sad; her late grandmother, a pâtissière (French for "female pastry chef"), could always cheer her up with her "magic" cakes. One day, during a pastry convention, Ichigo meets Henri Lucas, a pâtissier from the French baking school St. Marie Academy. He lets her try his newest cake, and she's able to describe the feelings that inspired it after one bite! What amazing taste she has!

That's it—Ichigo decides she wants to be a pâtissière and make sweets that spread happiness. Henri helps her enroll at St. Marie (which conveniently has a Japanese division), and thus begins her journey down her grandmother's path! But Ichigo's clumsiness catches up to her, and baking proves harder than she imagined. To make things worse, she's placed in the same team as the Sweets Princes, St. Marie's three master pâtissiers! Thankfully, more help comes to her in a tiny form: a "Sweets Spirit" named Vanilla, who's also trying to become a pâtissière in her world.

Season two, Yumeiro Pâtissière SP Professional, jumps a couple years ahead of the manga's story. Now in high school, Ichigo and the Princes become involved in a special project led by Henri. Each student must maintain a real pastry shop, including creating the menu and keeping the business in the black. This time, Ichigo must prove she can turn her love for sweets into a career. (Of course, there's also plenty of high school romance drama mixed in as well.)

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This show provides examples of

• All of the Other Reindeer: Ichigo's classmates mock her for being a complete newbie at baking, especially since she's in the A-group with the Princes. She'll only make them look bad. What was Henri thinking?
• Alpha Bitch, Girl Posse: Group B. They later turn face, however.
• Ambiguously Brown: Mari's friend Linda. Seriously.
• Ambiguously Gay: Hanabusa sure does seem like it sometimes...but he's not, if his advances towards Ichigo are any indication.
• An Aesop: Simultaneously inverted and played straight in episodes 24 and 25: Team Koshiro wins the match by cheating, providing the inversion, while Kashino allows his misogynistic pride to lead to him to making a promise he couldn't keep (namely that he would join The Heiress's team, if he lost), but of course, had to, since "a promise is a promise".

• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Ichigo and Kashino, at the very, very, VERY end of the first season. A tad bit sudden on her part? Maybe. But no one cares.
• Banana Peel: In the Christmas episode, one of the B-Group girls tries this oldie on Ichigo...and, much to everyone's surprise, it actually works.
  • There's a little lampshading in this scene—one of the girl's friends points out how cliché the banana peel prank is and that it probably won't work.
• Big Applesauce: The second season's "Dance and Rhapsody" arc is set in New York.

• Bishie Sparkle: Hanabusa and Ricardo to the nth degree. Henri too, just less. The two former ones even start a Bishie Sparkle war at some point in the anime.
  Kashino: *looks at the bishie sparkles* See what you got us into?
  Ichigo: Sorry...
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Revealed in episode 48 to be Henri Lucas, who laid a trap for Mari Tennouji to see if she could keep her heart strong after seeing Henri and Francois together. For Tennouji, who crushed on him for so long, this was a hard blow to her since it was what made her lose at the semi-finals.
  • But he only did that to actually HELP Tennouji to let her surpass HIM, instead of only wanting to catch up to him.
• Black Sheep: Kashino comes from a massive family of doctors and was expected to become one, too. Nope, he decided he wanted to be a pâtissier and made a deal with his parents that if he ever dropped from head-of-the-class, he'd give up and return home. Ichigo as well, as she's the only member of the family not specializing in art.
• Bland-Name Product / Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Several of them during the Dance and Rhapsody arc in Yume-Pati Pro, which is set in New York. A couple of them include "Toureba" (Toshiba), and "The Lion Kong".
• Chekhov's Gun: The spoon Ichigo receives from the mysterious old lady during her first visit to the Sweets Kingdom turns out to be the key that opens her grandmother's recipe book. Later on, it also opens the secret door in the Court Patissiere Museum.
• The Chosen Many: A few St. Marie students have a Sweets Spirit partner (most notably the four main characters), Tennouji has one as well since she is such a prodigy, and the Heiress eventually gets her partner after showing her determination. Once they go to Paris to participate in the Grand Prix we find out not only Henri-sensei had one (naturally), but every team member who participates, the spirits are even part of the contest by this point.
• Christmas Episode: Ichigo and the Princes make a special cake for two, reunited lovers. Random, yet sweet.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Koshiro Miya, to Kashino.
• Color-Coded Characters: In the anime, the shades for the chef suits are colored differently for protagonists. Background characters have an aqua green shade on their suits.
• Cooking Duel: Ichigo vs. "The Heiress" to see who can make the best pudding. The winner gets to enter the Cake Grand Prix with the Sweets Princes. Ichigo wins (of course) by figuring out that the judge likes bitter foods and intentionally making the caramel topping bitter. The Cake Gran Prix counts as a big one as well.
• Cute Ghost Girl: Marie Lucas (The foundress of St. Marie Academy and Henri's grandmother) appears as a ghost to Ichigo and Vanilla in one extra chapter in the manga. The reason of her youthfulness is that since she died, she can manifest herself at any form she wants.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Lemon-chan in episode 21.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage:
  • In one of the birthday cake episodes, Vanilla, while posing for Ichigo's marzipan statue, starts humming the opening theme.
  • In "Happy Sweets Dream," the Sweets Spirits start singing a (bad) rendition of the theme song.
  • In the beginning of the last episode of Professional, Vanilla hums "Sweet Romance" while she works.

• Doppelgänger: Kashino, Hanabusa, and Andoh have chibi versions Kashii, Narci, and Andy in the Sweets Kingdom.
• Dreaming of a White Christmas: In Professional. Miya blames the snow for the lackluster sales on that day, since her customers had to wait in the cold and eventually gave up.
• Edible Theme Naming: All of the Sweets Spirits (except the Queen, whose name is revealed in the manga to be Marie) and Ichigo.

• Fairy Companion: The Sweets Spirits are this to aspiring pâtissières.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: Kashino's parents are against his dream of becoming a pastry chef and have warned him if he drops from first place he'll drop out of school
• French Chef: The lead character studies to be a pâtissière in a French baking school.
• Filler Arc: The Paris arc; see Overtook the Manga below.
• First Kiss: Ichigo and Kashino finally have theirs on the last episode of Professional.
• First-Name Basis: Ichigo and Kashino finally call each other by their first names at the end of Professional, but in the last moment, Kashino lapses back into calling her "Amano."
• Genius Ditz: Besides her expertise in her namesake, Caramel also manages to recreate a bust of Michelangelo's David on a bon bon chocolat. From memory. This is, of course, in between her repeatedly tripping over herself and not originally knowing what a bon bon chocolat was.
• Girliness Upgrade: Ichigo goes through this for the second season.
• Gratuitous English: Courtesy of Johnny and Maize.
  • Kashino's shirt in the eleventh chapter of the manga. Asides from the text making no sense, it changes from panel to panel!
• Gratuitous French: And a lot of it. After all, French is everywhere in this show. It's in the title and the song, the characters use it, they learn it at St. Marie. Hey, the school's French!
  • Vanilla, in particular, likes to answer yes-or-no questions in French.
• Heroic BSoD: Episode 48 reveals that Mari went thought this when she sees Henri-sensei flirting around with the leader of Team Francois. This even causes her team to lose the semi-finals.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: It took a while, but Miya finally gets one. She loses the re-match in the World Cake Grand Prix semi-finals to Team Ichigo for the same reason she won many of her other competitions: her superior ingredients, which came exclusively from Chateau Seika. Team Ichigo, using chocolate from around the world, gave a less-expensive but more-expansive range of tastes, which impressed the judges vastly.
  • And again in the finale of Professional. Miya buys a huge advertisement campaign that initially gives her sweets shop a huge lead in a sale battle with Ichigo and co's sweets shop. However, on the final day it starts snowing, losing Miya tons of customers due to the long line to get inside. In the end, both teams tied in gross sales, but Miya's shop ends up conceding defeat due to net sales since the advertising campaign was so expensive.
• Holding Hands: Ichigo and Kashino at the end of the first season. And we even get a close-up of the gesture to possibly compensate for the long wait.
• Holier Than Thou: Referred BY NAME in the manga. Kashino says those exact words when describing Mari Tennouji's "point of view on the others".
• Honorary Princess: Kashino, Andou, and Hanabusa are nicknamed Sweets Princes due to their skills in bakery. Also, in Tennouji's team, one of the boys calls Mari Tennouji "Princess Mari", because of her talents, and because she is the student council president.
• How Much Did You Hear?: When Ichigo has her little heart-to-heart with her sister Natsume in episode 28, she isn't aware at first that the Sweets Princes were hearing the whole thing.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Uses "recette" (French for "recipe") in place of "episode"
• Impossible Task: Not only do the teams have to create an elaborate dress made out of chocolate in episode 44, someone has to model the creations (and even dance in them) at the masked ball afterward! How Koshiro can move at all while wearing her team's monstrosity, no one knows.

• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: In Episode 11 of YumePati Pro, Hanabusa and Andoh say this to Kashino as far as his relationship with Ichigo is concerned.
• Invisible to Normals: Only people who have Sweets Spirits can see them.

• The Klutz: According to Ichigo's dad, she trips three times a month. She's also quite clumsy in the kitchen at St. Marie.
• Last-Minute Hookup: Ichigo and Kashino. But at least there is a second season to enjoy the result.
• Limited Wardrobe: Johnny is the only human character who wears the exact same clothes in every episode. This usually applies to the sweets spirits, although there have been episodes where they wear something different.
• Love Confession: According to the manga Mari confessed numerous times to Henrie, only for him to always turn her down saying that they are better as students and teacher.
• Lucky Charms Title: The opening theme is called "Yume ni EERU! PATISHIEERU♪."
• Meaningful Name: Ichigo can mean "strawberry," a fruit used in baking and topping cakes. The kanji for Amano (天野) is read as "sky field," but it could be a pun, as it looks like "sweet," from amai (甘い) and no (の). The Sweets Spirits' names are foods and flavors, like Vanilla, Chocolat (French, not a typo), Caramel, Cafe, Honey, Marron, Orange (it's not pronounced the traditional ORENJI [オレンジ], but ORANJU [オランジュ], which is a much more accurate way to say it), Peach, Cherry, and Black Cherry.
  • Sweet, in Japanese, also means indulgent and naive (in a bad way, usually translated as "fool")
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: Maize slaughters the Japanese language often and has to be corrected by the other Sweets Spirits.
• Narcissist: Hanabusa.
• The Nicknamer: Andou's brother Ichita has a nickname for each of Andou's friends. Ichigo's is "Cake Hog," which she, of course, doesn't take kindly to.
• Noblewoman's Laugh: Koshiro Miya (the "Heiress") laughs in this manner and has over a total of 3 minutes of screentime doing that laugh. Although, viewers have pointed out that her laugh sounds closer to the barks of a chihuahua or corgi.
• Oblivious to Love: Ichigo sure seems to be. Poor Hanabusa.
  • And poor Kashino, although he wouldn't blatantly show how it affects him.
  • Inverted with Kashino, who got so sick of all the fangirls he has had in his life, that it drove him to misogyny (although he begrudgingly tolerates Ichigo and eventually falls for her).
• Ojou: Koshiro Miya; in fact, that is what everyone calls her.
• Older Than They Look: The Sweets Spirits (Mint, the youngest of them, is 150 years old!) and Marie Lucas' ghost.
• Omake: At least one per volume in the manga. We even discover the name of the Sweets Spirit Queen (her name is Marie, which makes her the only Sweets Spirit to not have an Edible Theme Naming) in one of them.
• On The Next Episode Of Catchphrase: As stated at the top, "Won't you have some of my dream-colored sweets?"

• OVA: Yumeiro Pâtissiére Mune Mune Kyun Tropical Island, a seven minutes short in which Ichigo, Kashino, Andou, Hanabusa and the Spirits are, by no explained reason, trapped on an island in the middle of nowhere.
• Percussive Maintenance: Amano knows the best way to fix a broken oven. Actually subverted; it starts to spark right after it starts working again, and then explodes.
• Pimped-Out Dress: Ichigo's strawberry and Miya's giant chocolate dresses in the episode "Chocolate Princess".

• Precocious Crush: Mari fell in love with Henrie when she was a little kid, and is what inspired her to become a pâtissière.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: The Valentine's Day episode, but especially in the scene where everyone dances to Tchaikovsky's "Waltz of the Flowers".
  • Episode 45 has the opening to Swan Lake when Miya does her best Odette (to impress Kashino of course). In a later scene, The Wedding March is heard during Miya's delusions of grandeur thinking she's going to marry Kashino "when" she wins the semi-final rematch. Not surprisingly, she loses.
• Really 700 Years Old: The Sweets Spirits. Mint, the youngest, is 150 years old! And Cafe says that's "so young!"
• Red Herring: The grey-haired male judge is the only one (besides Henri) who appears in the theme song, making you think he may have some significance in the story. He's the director of St. Marie in Japan and a judge at the Grand Prixes, but he's no more important than that.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Koshiro Miya, who always buys extraordinarily expensive ingredients and can be relied upon to use her money and influence to compensate for her (relative) lack of skill. Her "accomplishments" include paying some of the greatest patissieres in the world to teach her their secrets and buying 200 kilograms of super-expensive chocolate to make a fondue, though she has managed to top herself by buying one of the St. Marie campuses so she could enter the World Grand Prix, even after being knocked out in the first round of the high school tournament.

• Shout-Out: In episode 17, the F-Group boys mention that anime with a cute character saying "Moe, moe~"[1] and then talk about listening to "Yui's song" after class. Considering how popular K-On! is in Japan, it's pretty obvious that's what they were talking about.

• Significant Name Overlap: In-universe. The foundress of Saint Marie Academy and the Sweets Spirit Queen are both named Marie. In fact, sharing the same name is what started their friendship and eventually gave birth to the whole partnership system between humans and Sweets Spirits.
• Shown Their Work: The level of detail put into the cooking techniques are nothing short of impressive. The recipes (Yes, acidic fruits tend to be bad for gelatin), the little facts about certain techniques (The temperature for chocolate is on the mark, and using a marble slab will temper your chocolate. Heck, if you look closely, you can sometimes see Kashino use the back of a small sheet pan for tempering, which is a very smart alternative.), and proper habits for succeeding in the field (lots and lots of practice, constructive feedback, sketching plating ideas, proper clean up, etc). They do kind of get some very small parts wrong, but it can be passed off as the rule of cool.
• Slice of Life: No pun intended
• Something about a Rose: Hanabusa has an affinity for them.
• Sore Loser: Ichimatsu team, "Ojou" Koshiro and François all yell at some point that they "can't accept the result."
• Status Quo Is God: The sales battle between Beautiful Night Castle vs. La Rêve Couleur sales ends in a tie. Then after Johnny and Miya concede defeat based on net sales (Miya spent more on advertising than the shop made), they go back on it and say they only gave up chasing Ichigo and Kashino for that day and will never stop. Then Ichigo and Kashino head to London to help out with a new Marie's Garden/Marry's Garden, bringing the season full circle.
  • Kashino is forced to join Miya's team after losing a bet to her. However, this only lasts for all of one episode since Kashino figures out that Miya likes being in charge more than pursuing her crush and gets himself kicked out by acting extremely bossy. This doesn't stop Miya from continuing to pursue Kashino though.

• Technician Versus Performer: Sometimes instead of sticking to the techniques of baking, Ichigo will try to get by with appeal and taste—and it works. A good example is during her Cooking Duel with "The Heiress," when Ichigo intentionally burnt her pudding's caramel topping, making it bitter, because she had noticed that the judge likes bitter foods. This is also brought up by Henri during the finals of the World Cake Grand Prix when Ichigo makes every one of her tarts based on the judge's preferences while her opponent Francois just served everyone the same dessert out of arrogance about her skills.
• There Is Only One Bed: Both Ichigo/Kashino and Hanabusa/Andoh face this dilemma during the patisserie visit episode in Paris.
• Time Skip: The second season is an original story not based on the manga, which the first season had already overtaken.
• Title Drop: Very close at least. In Professional episode 11, when Ichigo's team finally creates their shop, Ichigo randomly says it's a "dream-colored pâtisserie" (yume iro pâtisserie). They translate it the yume iro part roughly into French, "La Rêve Couleur," and use it as the shop's name.
• Title Theme Tune: Close enough—"Shiawase wo ageru yo! Yume iro no PATISHIEERU!!" (I'll give you happiness! The dream-colored pâtissière!!)
  • Out of the context of the song, the "no" could be omitted and the line would have the same meaning.
• Tournament Arc: The Cake Grand Prix...at least, that's where it appears to be headed.
  • It even has brackets!
• Tsundere: Chocolat is a very cliche one, perhaps to contrast Kashino, a more subtle variation. Andou's little brother Ichita could count, too.
  • Marron can be one.
• Training from Hell: All-night baking lessons, French cram sessions, push-ups, and laps around the school? Every day? Is there more to being a pastry chef than Ichigo ever imagined...or are the Princes just sadistic?
  • Actually, in the manga, Andou and Hanabusa called Kashino an S, as in the one in an S&M relationship...
  • Subverted in the case of Koshiro Miya: she intentionally invokes this by inviting world-class pastry chefs to teach her their secrets. She still ends up being slightly worse than the main characters.
• Unmoving Plaid: The older female judge in episode 45.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Ichigo in general. From the start and even on the long run, she sometimes lacks basic knowledge of baking and tends to struggle with the technical side of things. However, she becomes an asset to the much more skilled Sweets Princes thanks to her very imaginative approach to the themes of desserts, her excellent palate which helps her in coming up with flavor combinations that will make the desserts compliment one another rather than have clashing flavors, and her knack for figuring out what tastes certain people seem to prefer which ends up being a crucial element in helping her team win the Grand Prix in the season 1 finale.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: By the time they get to Paris, it becomes clear that everyone in the Cake Grand Prix, and pretty much anyone of importance who has ever gone to St. Marie's, has (or had) a Sweets Spirit. After the initial shock of this revelation, everyone seems to get over it pretty quickly.
• Verbal Tic: Caramel, desu. Also don't forget Chocolat, desu wa. There's also Mint, deshi.

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