Patisserie 16: Rhubarb and Rose Buttercream Macarons

 Once I got back to my home kitchen, I was determined to prove that my improved macaronage and troubleshooting from previous macaron bakes were the culprits of my issues with this pastry. So I made a batch of macarons, intending to fill them with a rhubarb and ginger white chocolate ganache. 

Suffice to say, white chocolate behaves significantly differently than other types of chocolate, and my ganache was an utter failure. Basically, the lack of cacao content means that it sets softer and in general requires far less liquid to make a ganache; my resulting ganache, based on a recipe for dark chocolate, was way too liquid. But I baked up a batch of the macaron shells anyways, figuring I'd find some other type of filling for them the next day when I was less frustrated. 

Patisserie Intermission: Baking Abroad

 It's kind of odd that, despite a monthlong trip in Europe while unemployed sounds like a relaxing time, it was actually one of the least relaxing trips I've taken here. Herein lies the trap of letting your hobbies become your responsibilities: it will follow you home through the goodness of your heart wanting to help you improve. I got the itch to bake and write, and so, funded by my parents' desire to stop hearing me threaten to go home because I couldn't cook in their kitchen, I purchased a few bare bones pieces of equipment and was able to make some decent pastry explorations while there. 

In total, I bought: 

• A kitchen scale
• A rubber spatula
• A pastry brush
• A single silicone mold
• Food coloring
• A set of circle cutters
• A piping bag (13")
  
• A piping tip (round, 10mm)
• An offset spatula
  

And with those, I was able to make...

Patisserie 15: Orange marmalade and pastry cream macarons

 I had an abundance of oranges from my produce box that I wanted to use up before heading out for a month of travel coming up, so I decided to make marmalade, and what better use for a tiny batch of marmalade than as filling for another batch of macarons? 

I was also excited to try making macarons in my kitchen this time, without my friend's helpful guidance, to see if I had learned anything from our previous collaboration. 

I don't have a whole lot of photos from the marmalade process, because my focus on this journey is on the patisserie, but the basic gist is that I riffed on this recipe from David Lebovitz using five oranges and a lemon. Because I was going to be using the filling in macarons, I used a zester instead of cutting up the peel, so the resulting bits of marmalade would be smaller. 

Patisserie 14: Blood Orange and Rosemary Macarons

Macarons are a type of sandwich cookie that has exploded in popularity in recent years as a dainty snack. Laduree in Paris is largely credited with introducing the cookie to the public as the Parisian Macaron, where macaron previously referred to the unfilled, singular cookie halves. The cookie portions are meringue with almond flour, and the filling is typically a ganache, buttercream, or other semi-solid flavor component. The cookie is typically smooth on top, with a ruffled brim called the "foot", and flat on the bottom, and assembled macarons are aged for at least a day after filling to allow the cookie interior to moisten.

So, I've been dreading this section on macarons because their recent popularity has taken the form of the pastry down the same road as the croissant: held to a known standard that prioritizes hyperoptimization of certain features that the public has deemed "ideal". In the case of croissants, I am in major disagreement with several of the ideal features and thus unmotivated to pursue them as a pastry learning endeavor; in the case of macarons, I simply did not think I would like eating them enough to want to make batches over and over to iron out issues that might not even matter in the finished product. They're intimidating because there are a lot of ways they can go "wrong" according to the rubric of the ideal, and perfecting them is tedious (as one can imagine from the multitude of blogs proclaiming strategies for troubleshooting to obtain the "perfect" macaron). Plus, the last time I made them, which was admittedly almost a decade ago in college, they were absolutely a disaster, ideal aside. 

But I didn't start this trajectory of patisserie to just make things I think are adequate, I guess. I want to get good, to figure out why some things go wrong and how to fix them, and to make little cakes I will want to eat more than what I see in a pastry shop window. So I dutifully called up a friend who often makes macarons for gatherings of friends and headed to her kitchen with a bunch of equipment in tow for a guided macaron baking session.