Baking Interlude: Macarons!

Happy Memorial Day, everyone! My sister and I were home from school on Friday for Memorial Day weekend while our parents were at work, so of course that called for making something that would be likely to get us yelled at. We looked through my extensive list of recipes that I need to try and settled on the most difficult one: macarons. We've wanted to try macarons since we first saw them on a cute food blog about two years ago, but the closest we came to tasting them were frozen ones from Trader Joe's, which we were too impatient to defrost. We came this close to trying them when we saw them in a bakery while on vacation in London, but it was not to be.

Ok, they are supposed to be difficult to make, from what I've seen on the internet. Apparently you need to age the egg whites, and triple-sift everything, and you shouldn't even try to make them if it's raining or if the moon is in the last quarter or if you're prone to demonic possession or something. So, I wasn't sure if this was going to work out, but then I saw the post on Brave Tart busting these myths, and decided to just wing it. So we used egg whites straight from the fridge (have teenage girls ever been renowned for their patience?) and taunted the storm gods by making macarons in the dripping humidity while it was drizzling outside.

Here they are in the oven! Granted, I have no idea what they're supposed to look like while baking, but this looks good enough for me. Sorry, I keep forgetting to actually take pictures of the steps while I'm doing this, so I mostly have shots of them finished. I used Brave Tart's recipe, which I'm linking because I still don't know the proper etiquette for posting other people's recipes. I basically just whipped the egg whites and sugar, dumped in the dry ingredients, folded them together until it looked like a batter, and piped them onto parchment paper.

While they were baking, I put together a chocolate mousse to fill them. I just stirred 4 oz chocolate chips into 4 oz hot cream, then added 2 tablespoons of butter and chilled it. Next time, I'll probably leave out the butter, because it didn't set as firmly as I would have liked.

Here they are all baked! I notice that they didn't develop that cute little foamy looking strip that I gather is called the "foot", but they tasted good. They were a little bit tastier than a straight meringue, nutty from the almond and almost a bit chewy on the inside. I whipped up my chilled mousse and piped it into the shells.

If you look closely in the background of that last picture, you can see the head of one of my cats :)

As you may have noticed, I also made some heart shaped ones, which I though came out even cuter than the plain circles. Here's one finished:

This is actually filled with a chocolate-cinnimon buttercream that I had in my freezer from making cupcakes a few weeks ago, because I ran out of mousse two thirds of the way through. The cinnamon was good, but we all pretty much agreed that the chocolate was the best.

A Baking Interlude with Kitcheneer A

Ok, I'll be honest here, as much as I like pizza, I REALLY like baking things. Anything. So in between pizza taste tests, be prepared for some Baking Interludes.

My sister, AKA Kitcheneer V, is athletic, unlike me. The other day was her last track practice of the year, so of course I was commissioned to make 50 cupcakes for the track team. And everyone knows that ice cream cone cupcakes are by far the best kind, so that was a must as well. I had to work on Sunday when we were doing this, so the cupcake making actually went on at eight at night, which doesn't sound late, but it is when you need to get up for school at 5:30 the next morning. By the time we were done, it was after ten, but cupcakes are always worth it.

I, being preoccupied by all things floury and also a horribly unmotivated library worker after four hours of straightening books, spent my shift trying to think of a way to make plain vanilla cupcakes interesting. Interesting to me, anyway. You see, I have a weirdly long list of strange and sometimes kind of gross sounding kitchen experiments that I am always looking for an excuse to try, and I never want to waste a baking opportunity on something ordinary. Then I remembered the Cake Boss cookbook that I had shelved the other week, and my promise to a cupcake-obsessed friend to try out the Cake Boss vanilla cake recipe. Aha, perfect for non-boring vanilla cupcakes! But oh no! Upon checking the catalog, I found that someone had taken out the cookbook. I was very dissappointed for about 30 seconds before I remembered the internet. Lo and behold, the recipe was one Google search away.

The secret to these seems to be the two cups of delicious italian pastry cream in the batter. We doubled the recipe (a LOT of eggs) to be sure we'd have enough for 50 cupcakes, and with a full four cups of custard along with all of the batter, it barely fit into my biggest mixing bowl. Oops. But we managed to eventually get most of the batter into the ice cream cones, and most of the cones into the oven. Except for the one that shattered when I touched it, but let's not talk about that.

They took forever to bake! Or maybe it was just that my mom was falling asleep in the living room and telling me to go upstairs every five minutes. I was afraid they were going to burn on top before they were cooked in the middle; there seemed to be so much sugar in the batter that it started to caramelize on the crown of the cupcake.

Yum. I had to wait until after school and another shift at the library on Monday before I got the chance to frost the forest of cupcakes. I just piped on some vanilla buttercream- I don't remember what recipe I used, but something really basic. I think they came out kind of cute, though. :)

And after all of that, I still have a Ziplock bag full of this batter in my freezer. I have no idea if it will still bake up good when I eventually get around to baking that, but I don't really care- I'm happy enough with how this batch came out.

By the way, I have absolutely no photography experience, and take pictures with my phone for lack of an actual camera. I'd apologize for the sub-par photos, but I'm actually surprised they came out this good at all. Happy kitcheneering!