11/02/2013

Once Upon a Macaron

“You'll never know everything about anything, especially something you love.” ~ Julia Child
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I'm pretty proud of these sweet little things. For Christmas I received Gesine Bullock-Prado's book Sugar Baby, I've watched her video on how to make Parisian Macaron's and after my first failed attempt at making them, I was excited to finally try her recipe which looked much easier. There was a couple hiccups mainly just figuring out how to work with our oven and knowing how to adjust the way I was baking them due to the results I was getting. My first pan was really good, the feet were a little lopsided but I read that it was due to uneven temperature in your oven --- nothing much I could do there, I did read that using the fan for the confection setting didn't always work well so I adjusted my settings to bake, I don't think that made much of a difference.
 I only had one pan that I was confident in using for these delicate little pastries so for my second batch I made the mistake of not letting the pan cool off, resulting in cracked shells. I remedied this, however, by sticking the pan in the snow outside of the kitchen door for a couple of minutes! After that most of my pans came out amazingly!
I kept the flavour pretty simple, vanilla Italian meringue buttercream for the filling and I kept the shells plain (the almond flour does add some flavour to the batter) adding just some violet food colouring. I'll be a bit more adventurous next time I make these!
I put some away in the freezer so when my brother comes home for reading week, he can try them too. I don't know how that will turn out...the recipe said you could freeze them tightly sealed for up to two weeks, but we'll see how things go.

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I am back to school today after having 6 days off for Teacher's Convention, it's hard to get back into the groove of waking up and attempting to actually learn things so early in the morning, it helps though that the days have been getting longer and it was actually light outside as we drove to school at eight this morning! I can't wait for spring, we have so much snow outside though that it probably will be a couple months before we can see the grass, albeit brown.
We went ski-dooing before supper a.k.a. shoveling/stomping the snow around the ski-doo trying to get it unstuck, and the snow was more than half way up my thigh in some places! It was such a relief to get back into our yard, we probably got stuck at least 10 times --- so tiring...I guess we got some exercise! It's warming up so hopefully a bunch of snow melts before we get some more.
Anyway what can you expect, we live in Canada, eh? ;)

3 comments:

  1. Macarons are so tricky to make, which is the main reason why I've never attempted making them. But yours look absolutely gorgeous. The pale lavender and that buttercreme that looks like ribbons - perfect.

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