Dueling Cookbooks: French Macarons, Alice Medrich and Fiona Cairns

So I've been seeing these french macarons around the world wide interwebs for awhile now, and finally had to see what all the fuss was about. I decided to play dueling cookbooks and used recipes from two different books: Alice Medrich's "Chewy, Gooey, Crispy, Crunchy Melt-In-Your-Mouth-Cookies", and Fiona Cairn's "Bake and Decorate"

French macarons are basically a meringue with almond meal added. The almond meal is very pricey-$10 for a 1 pound bag. That was really hard for my cheap self to place in the shopping cart:)

The recipes were very similar, but had some differences in ingredients and technique. First up: Alice Medrich's Recipe

First, the almond meal and powdered sugar are mixed together, and then go through a strainer to aerate

I wanted to try the coffee-flavored variety, so I added some coffee powder to the dry ingredients. I only had regular instant coffee, which didn't dissolve much- next time I will definitely use espresso powder.

The egg whites and food color get whipped to stiff peaks. Well, that was what the recipe said: mine just turned into a foamy blobby shape:


Said Foamy blob:

Not sure if I just overbeat? Then the almond meal gets folded into the whipped egg whites:


I was a little nervous at this point that I had failed, since it was kind of a lumpy-looking mess; but as the ingredients were quite expensive I persevered on and put the mixture in a pastry bag and piped it onto parchment-lined cookie sheets:



Then the macarons "rest" for 20-30 minutes before going into the oven. In this recipe, the macarons go into a pre-heated 400 degree oven, which is immediately turned down to 300- the quick blast of 400 is supposed to help give the macaron a "foot" or platform- a desirable macaron quality apparently:P



Then the filling:Nutella:) I try not to buy Nutella too often as I have the tendency to eat it straight from the jar. The flavor combo was soooo good!





Now time for Fiona Cairn's recipe. In her version, the powdered sugar is sifted, and then the almond meal mixed in.

Then the egg whites get whipped with the food color. Note to self- in future use a LOT more food color to get the garish macaron colors you see in pictures (usually I don't like to go overboard on food color in baked goods- but something about those bright, bright cookies makes me smile:)

Cairn's recipe differs from Medrichs as it uses a little superfine sugar with the egg whites. (I don't have superfine sugar in my kitchen, so I just put some for a spin in my coffee grinder and Voila! superfine sugar)




Then, the almond mixture is folded in, and piped onto the prepared pans:



Let rest for 20-30 minutes. The baking instructions also differ a bit from the other recipe. In this recipe, the oven is pre-heated to 325 degrees, and baked with the door slightly ajar- she recommends putting a wooden spoon handle in the door.





The Cairn's recipe gives guidelines for different floral fillings: lavender, rose water, and orange flower. I tried the lavender. It is basically a white chocolate ganache, but the cream is first heated, then dried lavender is stirred in and steeps for 30 minutes to add flavor. It smelled so good in my kitchen:)



Very yummy, although the 1/3 cup cream to 3 ounce of white chocolate ratio is too runny. It also makes waaay more than needed. I was going to try and make a truffle with it, but managed to drop the bowl on my kitchen floor:(

The verdict? Both were delicious. I'd say the Medrich recipe is a little easier - no messing with superfine sugar- just the powdered, and turning the oven down seems better to me than leaving the door slightly open. Only the coffee macarons had the coveted "foot" but I'm not sure if that was because I erred on the side of under-beating the eggs since I feared I had overbeat the first ones. Both books are excellent and I can't wait to try more recipes from both.

Can't wait to make more varieties- the lemon flavor with lemon curd filling and cocoa flavored with ganache filling from Alice Medrich sound divine, as does the rose-water filling :)from Fiona Cairns

And I leave you with some cuteness to go with the sweetness:)

Coors Light/ Brewers Racing Sausages Cake

This week I did a cake for my friend Emily's boyfriend Bob. My original guidelines were something with either Coors Light or the Brewers (Milwaukee Brewers that is). I love the Klement's Racing Sausages, so I decided to do the Coors Light mountains logo with the racing sausages on top. If you don't know, the racing sausages are giant sausages that race during Brewer games

I started with two 3" tall cakes, one 8" and one 10" layer. I filled these with lemon pie filling.

When I split and fill layers, I use a dab of frosting to mark the layers to make putting them back together easy. I used to try and cut a notch or line, but that usually ends up too hard to see.

The Wilton cake mover is perfect for working with cake layers this size!

After I filled and stacked the layers, I popped the cake into the freezer for about 45 minutes to make it easier to carve. I used a serrated bread knife to make a mountainous shape:

Then I covered the whole thing in white chocolate ganache. First I nuked some of the ganache till it was quite runny, and used it as a thin crumb coat, then followed with a thicker layer of thicker ganache on top after the first layer set-up.


I then covered the cake in fondant. It seemed to be missing something, so I used some extra fondant to make mountain peak shapes along the edges of the cake board:



I rolled out some more fondant, leaving a hole the size of the bottom of the cake, and slid it over the top:






I used silver luster dust mixed with Everclear to paint the mountains, and added some moonstone luster dust areas for depth. I used melted white candy melts for snowy mountain tops

Now time for the sausages! I used modeling chocolate for the figures (love that stuff!) I had a lot of left-over red from the Lady Gaga cake, so I used the red to make a center base for all the sausages and added the other colors on top of that.

Here I'm getting ready to apply the outfit to the body of one of the figures:

And after:

For the striped shirt I just rolled thin sheets of red and blue modeling chocolate, applied them to the red center, and smoothed together.

Sorry there aren't more in-process pics of making the sausages. When I get into the decorator zone (not to be confused with the danger zone Mr. Loggins) I forget to take pictures.

Here is the finished cake:

I was trying to imitate the Coors' Light logo font for the Happy Birthday part:

It was fun to do a cake again finally (after three weeks I was going through caking withdrawal:P) but man was I tired- kudos to all you cakers with full-time "real-world" jobs out there- it is hard work to find the time, and I don't have kids either, extra kudos to mom/dad cake makers:)

After I finished I really wanted to go to bed, but I had one more cake to do for the evening- semi, kinda, sorta dirty- but very silly and all in good fun, here are some pix with no other details or explanation

Cookbook post 3 : Carole Walter's Great Cookies

Well, It is definitely cookie season, so for my next cookbook post/review I'll be using Carole Walter's "Great Cookies: Secrets to Sensational Sweets". I got this cookbook a year or two ago and have made not nearly enough of the recipes (the problem is I can't stop eating them if I make them)

You can visit Carol Walter's website here: http://www.carolewalter.com/index.htm

For this endeavor I chose to make "Carole's really great chocolate chip cookies" and "Chocolate chocolate chip cookies" (find the second recipe her on her website: http://www.carolewalter.com/chocolate_chocolate_chip_cookies.htm

Ghirardelli 60% chips are my grocery store fave (plus I'm poor so no premium chocolate for me:( )
For some reason my picture of the sugar and oatmeal in my food processor disappeared, so you will have to take my word for it. I love the addition of oatmeal to the flour, you can't really taste "oatmeal" but I think it adds a nice flavor ( dare I say complexity?) As I was only making a half batch, I used the crappy hand-held mixer instead of my beloved Kitchen Aid:

Halving the recipe called for half an egg. Usually in these situations I just opt for either the yolk or white, but decided to use my little measuring glass (Wal-Mart special- I love these and buy two at a time since I tend to break them regularly) to find exactly half:

Side tangent upon taking apart the food processor: beware the food processor blade: they are nasty little buggers. I don't know if you can see the barely perceptible scar below my ring-finger knuckle- but my one and only injury requiring stitches was due to said blade. Of all things, I managed to slice through my hand while drying dishes: the blade was sitting in the drying rack, and as I turned to get another dish I impaled my hand through the knuckle. Yes, I am accident prone. I once also nearly gave myself a concussion while flushing a toilet, but that's a whole nother story:

I usually hate using ice-cream scoops to do cookie dough, but in this case it worked well, just dipping the scoop into water after each 2 or 3 cookies

Mmmmm!

What the book promised looks-wise:

My cookies: The recipe warns to not overbake, but I like to live on the edge (i.e. get distracted by shiny/stupid things on the computer and not get the cookies out of the oven fast enough)

I had used my silicone mats instead of parchment, and had a sneaking suspicion that might have been part of the problem; so for the chocolate chocolate chip cookies I baked one half on parchment and one half on silicone. You be the judge:

Parchment it is. The only change I made from the original recipe was to use Ande's mint chips instead of just regular chocolate.

Both cookies, yes, even the ones I overbaked, were delicious- I definitely have to work my way through this one cover to cover.