Cooking: Failed Macaron Tower turned into Macaron White Chocolate Crepe Layer Cake

Blogger finally works at school!!! It has been blocked for a while for some reason but now they must have unblocked it, probably because I spend a lot of my spares reading food blogs =]

So on the weekend I tried to make a Macaron Tower for my friends birthday except after piping out 120 shells which looked fine and baking them, they all decided to be mean and stick to the baking paper and break when I tried to peel them off. In the end I ended up with 20 acutal macarons =[ absolutely devasted. Since 20 macarons were definitely not enough to feed my group of friends at the mini party we were going to hold, I decided on making a crepe layer cake with the failed white chocolate ganache I made.

I assumed that white chocolate ganache proportions would be similar to normal chocolate ganache proportions and how wrong I was. Normal chocolate ganache is 1:1 (meaning 100g chocolate, 100ml cream) white chocolate however as I discovered is 2:1 (200g white chocolate, 100 cream) and as I had a limitation of white chocolate it wouldn't set, hence a failed white ganache.

Decided to make a crepe layer cake instead since it was the quickest thing to make without a baking time, and I guess somewhat impressive but not as impressive as a macaron tower. Lesson learnt from making the crepe batter, add melted butter into the flour before adding eggs and milk, otherwise the cold milk will solidify the butter and you end up with a horrible looking batter. However it doesn't really matter as the butter melts when you make the crepes and self oils the pan....so I guess it's not too bad.

P.S I spend hours staring at my computer trying to type out an english essay but when I blog I just type like there's no tomorrow, effortless thinking....why can't writing essays be like writing blog posts?

Cooking: Macarons

Finally SUCCESS!!!!!! Learnt from my mistakes. Added food colouring whilst eggwhite were beating and actually FOLDING the sugar and almond meal in and not mixing it like there's no tomorrow.

Ingredients: 225g icing sugar, 140g almond meal, 100g eggwhites (approx 3 eggs)

Method: Weigh and sift sugar and almond meal. Whisk eggwhites to soft peaks, add colouring then whisk to stiff peaks. FOLD icing sugar and almond meal into eggwhites in 2-3 batches. Don't listen to the pros when they say it's alright that the air gets knocked out because their folding technique is so pro that they don't lose much air, but for the amateur, air gets knocked out due to inexperience. So by the time you have folded in all the ingredients it should be about the right consistency. Pipe onto sheet, beware that they do spread quite a bit so pipe them a lot smaller than you want them. Bake at around 130 for 10-12 mins. Good luck =]

I'm also getting a lot better at piping. Fairly uniform sizes and I'm starting to be able to do that quick flick lift up thing the pastry chefs do to make sure the mixture doesn't get everywhere and stays on the macaron, with some practice it's actually not hard.

However I'm still having trouble baking them as I don't know when they are done. Practice practice practice.

Filled it with the leftover chocolate ganache from the cake my bestie and I made last week.

Soooooooooo yummy =] 

Macaronssssssss

This morning mum decided to try and make macarons. Unfortunately I still had a bit of holiday homework to complete so I couldn't help out. By the time I had finished mum was about to pipe the shells so I helped her pipe them.

The mixture was grainy for some reason. And piping is very messy and it's tricky to keep them the same size which is important otherwise the macarons look funny when squished together.

After they came out of the oven. Looking half decent. Except didn't bake them for long enough.

Piped them with the left over durian curd from mum's birthday cake.

Chocolate macarons with durian filling.

Super super super sweet

Back to school tomorrow =(