Welcome Summer!

Eagerly gathering to discuss their filling.

As it turns out, I'm nothing like a fast food restaurant! That's good news. I already suspected this was the case but it's now been confirmed!
A few months back, a dear friend asked me if I could make macarons for her wedding to which I enthusiastically agreed. I made two batches this past Wednesday evening (Summer Solstice!) and save for a few duds (okay about ten duds out of the approximate 100 I made) they were all nearly perfect! I couldn't believe it. Maybe it was the sun shinning outside. Maybe it was the cold beer by my side. Maybe it was the excitement to share in the wedding of two really super lovely people. Maybe it was that I was finally able to find a half inch piping tip rather than just piping from a cut open end. Who knows for sure but whatever it was, it proved that quality doesn't have to be sacrificed for quantity, even with something as finicky as mes petites macarons. If my next try goes this well, I might be ready to graduate on to flavored shells. Oh my.....

3 Strikes You're Out? Hells No! Get me a new bat....

You know the old saying "When it rains, it pours"? This has never meant a whole lot to me until today, as I sit typing this entry with a BandAid on one of my typing fingers.
This morning started out grey and by 2pm it was full on raining outside and hasn't stopped in hours. With the rain has come some stormy weather in my kitchen as well and rain drops pouring from my frustrated eye balls.
Butter cream requires that you boil sugar until it reaches exactly 115 degrees Celsius. Boiling sugar with a candy thermometer that isn't working...blah. Cleaning rock hard, boiled sugar off of the pot, thermometer and beaters three times....double blah. Cutting yourself on hardened sugar (you bet there was blood)....triple blah.
What did all this teach me? Well for one, i need a new candy thermometer and secondly that sugar can be a real asshole sometimes (maybe the folks who avoid refined white sugar like the plague are on to something?). Despite this, the cupcakes I also made today (banana with peanut butter frosting) turned out beautifully. They'll go well with banana butter cream (that worked on the fourth try) filling for the macarons.
Notice I didn't even touch on the macaron shells themselves yet. They were okay. First batch was perfection, second and third I over macaroner-ed (over mixed) so they were somewhat unsuccessful. Frankly after this butter cream trouble, the shells are off the hook this time around.

It all made me long for simpler times when baking just required measuring with cups and spoons rather than scales. And meant turning on the oven, tossing the pans in and forgetting about it for 20 or so minutes. And knowing that as long as you didn't forget an important ingredient, things would turn out just fine.  Sigh*

You can't spell "Bicycle" without "Cocky".

My human feet are nice enough but these feet are better.

 Well, it's been several weeks since i last baked; life has just been busy. But in my head I thought: "Ah it'll be like riding a bike!" Not the case.
Tomorrow I'm going to feed my macarons to people who aren't only family members/close friends. I would like to impress these folks but alas, a great deal of my macaron shells were jerks: many of them slid over and were a messy disaster. Obviously I'd also like to impress you, my readers, so the photos I've included only feature the best in show but rest assured, half of each of the four batches were f#@%*ed up. (Just as I'm only showing you all the few pretty ones, I will carefully place those same few on top of the rest tomorrow when I take them to meet their fate so that the other guests at the party will think they're all that lovely. Sneaky)
Not terribly surprisingly, the baking seemed to be a crap shoot yet again-some on each of the pans were actually perfect while others were a mess. But as usual (and here comes the cocky), they tasted great. Tonight I made Orange Cream (hello orange colored filling that tastes like Creamsicle) and Maple (hi there cute pink filling) butter cream fillings which, combined with the tasty macaron shells, made for some pretty badass tasting little pastries.

Hm, at least my hiatus from baking hasn't caused me to lose much ground as far as baking technique goes (things were the usual disaster there) nor have I lost any arrogance in terms of how tasty my pastries are: I'm strutting through Flavor Ville, y'all.

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.

PG-13 Buttercream Prep

Summer must nearly be upon us.
If you've ever made buttercream, you'll know that it takes a long time for the butter and the beaten egg whites to emulsify. In making both macarons and buttercream, a stand mixer would be mucho helpful. Since I don't have one, I do it all with electric hand beaters. I point out the looming arrival of summer because last night as I stood in my kitchen rotating the hand beaters for a total of 26 minutes, I got so warm and had to remove my shirt.  There I am, in my underwear, making buttercream and sweating. To add to the magic of it all, i managed to splatter green food coloring and buttercream all over my bare gut (the food coloring, of course, left stains). But let me tell you, the toasted pistacio vanilla buttercream was worth the sorry sight I was making it. Oh and I also have a blister on the tip of my tongue from a hot-out-of-the-oven pitascio. 
Maybe the April Showers will bring me a stand mixer instead of May Flowers.

Dr. French Rachelle

There is much to-do about bigger being better, how many inches in enough, and so on. Obviously I'm not referring to male anatomy folks. This is a blog about baking, for chrissakes. I am talking about macaron size: 1/2" miniatures, 1" smalls, or 2" larges. Save for one other time, I've only done larges (insert smutty joke: _________ ). Today I made smalls 'cause that way I get 3 pans full rather than 2 and therefor a chance to experiment more with baking temperatures and techniques. And get this- I actually think I might be starting to come to some solid conclusions about what is at root of all my problems. Oven Temperature Runs Too Low. Alternate Baking Instructions, page 256 of the Bible. Ovens that run low can cause all kinds of problems, all of which I've had, but believed to be caused by something else. For the first time since I started this baking adventure, I did not have a stupid perplexed look on my face when I opened the oven door. I was starting to think I'd need some botox to get rid of the confusion-induced forehead wrinkles.  
Un: My control group. Baked the conventional way: 200 degrees for 15 minutes. Increase heat to 350 degrees and bake for another 9 minutes. As expected, they didn't work out. Looked like they partied too hard and threw up on themselves.
Deux: Used alternate Baking Instructions for ovens that run low. 425 degrees for 3 minutes. Decrease heat to 325 degrees and bake for an additional 6 minutes. Obviously that was too much of a good thing. Looked like they were trying to be fried chicken but they were all level footed and even.
Trois: Alternate baking instructions used again but I raised the oven rack to the middle and went 3 minutes at 425 degrees and only 4 1/2 minutes at 325 degrees. They were starting to brown so I took them out of the oven. Every single one looked perfect! Every single one. Unfortunately they were a little bit gooey on the inside soooooo I think next time around, I'm going to play around with the temperature and timing of the alternate baking instructions because I really feel like I'm on to something here.
Grad students work on their thesis', they conduct experiments, draw conclusions, defend the thesis and get their PhD's. If you know me, you know that I would never have the patience or discipline to get a doctorate in anything too intellectual but I'm going to call this my version of grad studies. I'm getting closer to having my dissertation ready....