A Mother's Love.

Purdy's, stick to the chocolates.

Ahhh, Mother's Day weekend. A time for moms everywhere to spoil their bratty adult daughters. Oh wait....

On a recent business trip to Vancouver BC, my lovely mother was thinking about me and bought me macarons from not one but two places. Who's heard of Purdy's Chocolates? They do decent chocolates. I've gorged myself on their dark chocolate with blueberries and almonds a couple times (although they did their version of an Easter Cream Egg this year. Don't even get me started there. You can't mess with perfection, Purdy's. Pfft). Anyways, over coffee and the Saturday morning news paper, I ate 6 bites of 6 different macarons. The two from Purdy's were weak. If i didn't know better, I'd say they were made of dry cake. I'm suspicious that perhaps Purdy's is trying to pass off something else as macarons. Imposters. Stick to the chocolatier-ing, yo.
The other 4, from a place called Stuart's Baked Goods in the Granville Public Market, were pretty damn good. Great texture, pretty colors. But here's what worries me: i think i might be a bitch. I felt pleased that theirs too had crooked feet. Also, the flavors were good but far too subtle to guess what they were without knowing. I mean, maybe it's 'cause I'm pretty much hollering from my roof and wearing a flashing sign that says what flavor mine are, but it seems to me that they are pretty obvious.  Maybe I'm delusional the way a mother is blinded by love for her child and thinks her's are the prettiest/most handsome and smartest even if they're ugly and stupid. Maybe I'm blinded by love for my little babies. Well at least I don't feel completely left out of the motherhood thing this Mother's Day.

Ba! Crooked feet here too!

Macaron Hunting Abroad: Part Deux

 On a recent trip to Toronto, I knew I would be successful at locating macarons for the portion of this project that I have been successful at from the very begining: eating them. If you recall, last time i tried to find macarons abroad, I was unsuccessful. This time, we decided the Saint Lawrence Market in downtown Toronto was the place to start.
Funny thing about that market: pretty much the whole upstairs is meat. Deli counters, sausage vendors, meat cabinets, sea food on ice... you get picture.  My friend and I had to laugh at this because all I wanted was French Pastry and all I (a long term herbivore) saw was meat. But as soon as we descended the staircase to the lower floor, the first thing we laid eyes on was a pastry cabinet filled with macarons. We bought six. But before we ate them, we had a full day of beer drinking, shopping and adventuring around  the city to get through. When we were finally ready to eat them, they were pretty sad looking. BUT, as we sunk our teeth into them, i understood immidiately why they held up so poorly: they were waaaaaay under baked. My friend, who had her macaron-tasting cherry popped that day in the back seat of a taxi cab after drinking beer all afternoon, said to me "Really? This is what all the fuss is about?".

How very sad that this was her first impression 'cause aren't first impressions everything? I immediately kicked into defense mode, trying to convince her that she'd have to try them again. Then it occurred to me that both times that I've purchased someone else's macarons, they have not been nearly as delicious as mine even though mine might not have looked as pretty. As I let the pride wash over me, I told my friend she'd just have to wait to taste the ones i make and that they were worth the 3000 kilometer trip across the country to do so, to which she happily agreed.