Macaron Madness: 10 Batches in 2 Weeks

Everybody describes making macarons as difficult.  Everybody also has a set of rules for making macarons: the egg whites must be aged! the egg whites must be at room temperature! you must sift the powdered sugar and almond mixture at least three times! the French meringue method is better!  no, the Italian method is better!

I took two week off work for the holidays at the end of December and made lots of plans, of which I actually did none. What I ended up doing was lying in bed and binge-watching the Great British Bake Off.  This is a fantastic show and I recommend that anybody who is into amateur baking should give it a try.  It is literally just about baking, and the judges' comments are very helpful.  One contestant made a quick comment while making macarons, which got me thinking about how all of my macarons came out perfectly in DC and failed miserably in SF.  So I decided to fix the problem.

An important point to know is that macarons (mah-kah-rohns) and macaroons (mah-ka-roons) are not the same thing.  They're derived from the same word which is why the names are similar, but the cookies are not:

This picture is supposedly from I Do Believe I Came With A Hat but I got it from this Pintrest page.

If you're Ashkenazi Jewish like me, you are mostly likely unfortunately aware of macaroons because they don't contain any flour and are commonly served as dessert during Passover, straight out of the Manischewitz tin.  They are terrible.

Macarons, on the other hand, are small sugar bomb sandwiches that have a softer filling and a crunchy outer shell of meringue.  It's these shells that have the reputation for being so difficult to get right.

This blog entry is a little bit different from the others.  It only has one recipe and details all of the various things I did to get these suckers to come out right.

Nectarine Peach Cupcakes with Mango Swiss Meringue Buttercream Frosting (aka Still Alive!)

It has been roughly 15 months since my last post.  If anybody is actually following this blog, I apologize for disappearing.  There are lots of reasons for not updating but they all boil down to the same idea: life happened.  My job got very busy, I moved, traveled to other countries, got a lung infection that knocked me out for 3 months, my father got meningitis, my sister had a baby, I got called for jury duty, my sister had a baby, and various other stuff.  Unfortunately the jury duty was not for anything even remotely resembling My Cousin Vinny.

When I am stressed out or low on time and/or energy, I end up baking the same set of trusted recipes over and over again.  Last month I decided that it was time to start trying new recipes again so I signed up for a cupcake potluck with the theme of "Summer Cupcakes".  This summer has been very bad in the Bay Area: for all intents and purposes, we are out of water.  There are large wildfires all over the state and the Pacific Northwest, to the point where sometimes the air looks like the smog back in LA in the 1970's.  We are supposed to get a massive El Nino this winter but I'm not putting any faith in the weather predictions.  I did not make "on fire without any water" cupcakes but I was tempted to.

My new kitchen is large but old and very run down, so there's no counter space and very little storage space.  The oven is so old and disgusting that I have to remove the battery in the smoke detector every time I turn it on since it produces enough smoke to set the stupid thing off.  I've cleaned the oven numerous times but nothing can remove the build up due to 40 years of use.  I get a real sense of accomplishment when I produce anything from this oven that looks good, tempered with some serious frustration about how gross and difficult to use it is.

Second Time's the Charm

Edit #2: oh my god it's March.  At this point, there just isn't any excuse for how long this has taken to write up.  The good news is that I have made several other recipes since the Super Bowl potluck.  Hopefully each of those won't take a whole month to get finished.

Edit #1: This used to be a wonderfully amusing write-up of what I made for K and B's Super Bowl potluck. I saved it multiple times, got the pictures exactly the way I wanted them, and even bothered to spellcheck the post.  And then, for some unknown reason, everything except the first couple of paragraphs disappeared.

So the entire post is gone, never to return.  Instead, I will leave you with the best part of it:

That is the team with possession of the ball for the first play of the game loosing control of said ball and then everybody running crazily after it.  It set the tone for the rest of the game.

K and B had a potluck at their new place to watch the Super Bowl.  B was interested in watching because he's from Alaska and the Seattle Seahawks are the closest football team to Alaska, so he grew up rooting for them.  The rest of us were just there to have a potluck and hang out.  Luckily, the Denver Broncos played so badly that we all sat around and laughed at them for 2 hours.  It's nice to have something to bond over.

The "second time" in the title is actually a reference to the fact that I used the potluck as an excuse to fix a couple of recipes that hadn't turned out well the first time but which had promise (and to try something new, of course).  In January, I had tried making a nutella cheesecake and Nigella's gooey chocolate stack.  The cheesecake never solidified but tasted great and the chocolate stack melted but tasted great.  My course was clear: get the great tasting desserts to have the right consistency.  I also made a batch of cookies just in case things didn't work out.

Everything's New But The Recipes

The original draft of this entry had a very long and complicated explanation of what happened after I moved, but I deleted it because a) it was boring and b) it can be summed up in one sentence: my new commute is much longer than my old commute.  It really has taken me 5 months to get my work/life balance sorted out, and even that isn't really done yet.  I will be transferring to a different office that is much closer, hopefully in the spring.  (I have also been procrastinating and have not gotten myself organized, which wastes most of my free time.)

The other thing I'm missing is a potluck group.  Right now I don't bake very often because there isn't anybody to eat the results.  As I meet more people and make some new friends, I will also acquire new guinea pigs.

Because I haven't had that much time to bake, I've been falling back on old recipes that I know like the back of my hand.  I've blogged about some of them before (my mother's hallah), thought I blogged about them but apparently didn't (pavlovas), and blogged about something similar (pumkpin souffle) that I then combined with yet another recipe that I thought I had previously written about but which also doesn't have a post (sufganiyot).  I posted pictures of pavlovas and sufganiyot on facebook but never got around to making blog entries for either one.  Did I mention that I'm disorganized and procrastinate a lot?

So this post has 4 months worth of experimentation: 3 new recipes, 2 explanations of things that I haven't written about but should have, and 1 success.

The three new recipes are apple stuffed cardamom hallah, pavlova with raspberry-pomegranate topping, and pumpkin sufganiyot.  These are all adaptations of recipes that I really like, so I've posted the original recipes and the changes I made.

Moving takes weeks longer than just the actual act of moving physical things from one location to another.  Usually I spend the first two weeks unpacking things and then wandering around the apartment, vainly trying to remember where I put all of my stuff.  My apartment is from the 1950's and hasn't been updated since then except for the oven and fridge.  Things it doesn't have: lots of electrical outlets, muted color schemes, a dishwasher, or a garbage disposal.  This is the kitchen:

Lucy Ricardo would have loved this place.

Check out the bathroom:

It would be so classy if it was tiled in black and white.

I always laugh when anybody says that the 1950's were so glamorous, people knew how to dress and decorate, etc.  No.  Some of the worst color schemes ever showed up in the 1950's.  While I'm living here, I pretend that I am a time-traveling anthropologist who is studying how the natives live in their pink-and-maroon habitat.  This is a very nice apartment with the exception of the color schemes (one for every room!).

I'm Too Poor For Your Recipe

Every cookbook and blog tell you the same thing: use high quality, fresh ingredients for the best tasting results.  This makes sense and I completely agree.  But there is a line between high quality ingredients and break-the-bank ingredients.  Certain blogs (no, I won't name them) assume that you have both access to quality but expensive foods and the bank balance to possibly waste a large quantity of said expensive foods.

"Take a quick hop over to Nepal and hike to the Lumbini Buddhist monastery.  Trade the monks for yak butter specially prepared according to the ancient rituals.  P.S. You need two cups of butter for this recipe."

No, thank you.  I will just use the regular, straight from the farm to my local farmer's market butter that is still kind of expensive but worth the money to support local farmers.

For this month's potluck, I tried two new recipes.  One was completely reasonable and used ingredients that I can get at my local supermarket.  The other one was also completely reasonable if you bake or cook using mostly pre-made stuff.  I am snobby enough that I will make my own whipped cream instead of using "whipped product".  This recipe was probably pretty cheap when made using Duncan Hines cake mix, etc, but became pretty expensive when I made almost everything from scratch.*  The good news is that everybody said both recipes tasted great, which is the most important part.

* Okay, so my complaint about how expensive the ingredients were for this recipe is due to my insistence on using expensive ingredients and not on the recipe itself, but let's forget about that so I can complain some more.

The first recipe was raspberry bars, although the original changed recipe used blackberries and the original original recipe used blueberries.  There weren't any blackberries at the store so the main ingredient changed.  People said that the crust was great and that the bars tasted very strongly of raspberry.  I like blackberries better than raspberries so I'll probably remake this one when blackberries are in season, or I may try this using cherries.  I also like this recipe because it shows the type of evolution that recipes undergo when we use in-season ingredients.  You can see how the basic structure and dough part of the recipe stay the same, but we all used different fruits.

The second recipe was a chocolate-nutella mousse stack cake.  If you love Nutella like I do, this is the cake for you.  This recipe also had very little from-scratch baking in it so my version has a similar result to the original but a very different set of steps.  People said that the Nutella mousse was fantastic as frosting, that the taste and texture was amazing.  They also said that the cake was great but the Nutella mousse got more compliments.  I would have felt better about all of this if the cake hadn't broken in the middle.

Cakes weigh a lot, so when you stack them up they need to be strong enough to hold up the layers on top of them and to stay together when stacked on top of other cakes.  Many cakes are moist and lovely but not strong enough to either hold up layers or stay together on top.  This cake recipe produced exactly that type of cake: moist, soft, and easily broken.  Stacking layers with this cake will work if you don't slice each cake into two layers.

Tea Sandwiches and Angel Food Cupcakes

When I moved to DC, I thought that it was an East Coast city that got snow regularly and that it had the infrastructure to handle snow.  How wrong I was.  This city can't handle more than an inch of snow.  Normally I just make disparaging comments comparing DC to Chicago, but at the end of January I ended up cooking for a baby shower twice due to DC's lack of snow skills.

My friend Y was pregnant and her due date was the second week of February.  I met Y at work and became friends with her and C, who are both great.  So C and I arranged to have a baby shower for Y.  We sent out invites, reserved a room, assigned various people to bring food and/or drinks - the whole shebang.

Three days before the baby shower, we found out that there was a major storm heading towards the East Coast.  The weather people were predicting 6 to 12 inches of snow in one night.  But then the predictions began to be downgraded and nobody was sure how much snow we would get.  C and I decided that we would do the baby shower and if work was closed due to massive snowfall, then we would just have some extra food at home to eat instead.

In the end, we got no snow at all but work was still closed down.  Why?  Because they got a half inch of snow.  Seriously.  So I was stuck with 36 angel food cupcakes and a whole bunch of tea sandwiches, all of which needed to be eaten in the next day or two.  I ended up having a spontaneous get-together at my place with a bunch of friends to eat all of the baby shower food, and then I made it all again the next week.

It all worked out in the end. Y had her baby three weeks early, a couple of days after the rescheduled shower.  But I learned a hard lesson about DC: the idea of snow makes everything shut down.

On the other hand, I can assure you that it is really easy to make angel food cupcakes and tea sandwiches.  Trust me, I made them twice in a week.