I Finally Got It Right: Strawberry Valentine's Macarons



I've made one hundred and eighty two million thousand "variations" (versions, renditions, interpretations...) and, behold, the first batch I've been happy with was this Valentine's one. They've just always been lopsided, cracked or footless. It's just completely baffles me how some people can churn out batch after batch of gorgeous, immaculate macarons. Not to mention all the hoity toity shops with their macaron towers. Pshah. I'll admit, I've been a little jealous walking by those shops.

A couple weeks ago, I made a double batch of macs intended for a party: half lemon curd buttercream filling, and the other half was a salted caramel popcorn mac. They were beautiful, but I was convinced they were underdone, and put all of them back in the oven on a "warm" setting to stiffen up and dry out for a few minutes.  I won't give you the blow-by-blow, but even after allowing them to mature, singing to them and pleading with them, they were brittle, crunchy, and just plain wrong. I had to chuck them.

Maybe it's my ego, or my stubbornness, or the crazy coming out (yeah, I'm a catch), but I just couldn't accept defeat. I folded them exactly 50 strokes, baked them at a low 280 degrees for a solid 16 minutes and gave them plenty of room in between so they wouldn't run into each other.

Me: This is getting to be an expensive hobby -  I keep making these things and throwing them away. I just. Can't. Give up!

BF: *Exhasperated look* You're being a perfectionist.  Your macarons are great.

Me: But they're not quite right. If I keep doing it over and over, maybe I'll get it right. Wait. Isn't that the definition of insanity, or something? Repeating the same behavior and expecting different results?

BF: As long as it keeps making you happy, you should keep doing it.

Me: So crazy is OK, if I'm happy?

For my Valentine, who's simply always encouraging.



Dad's Dark Chocolate Ganache Covered, Fresh Banana and Peanut Butter-Mousse Filled Yellow Birthday Cake

 

Happy New Year with a very very very late post. This cake is not even something I made this year but deserves a special post nonetheless. This was Dad's birthday cake from just before Christmas and it was one that was very carefully thought out. But I'm just going to be honest - I've newly rediscovered this phenomenon called "sleep", and I haven't baked a thing since the New Year except maybe a DiGorno's. And I'm not sorry at all. Christmas and New Years were the perfect end to 2011 with some time off of work, a great family gathering at my boyfriend's and then an epic ski trip with a big group of wonderfully silly and awesome friends.

My sister and I really had to puzzle this cake out. If we ever cooked or baked anything just for him, he'd obligingly eat it, but generally speaking, my dad doesn't really have a sweet tooth. We brain stormed and recollected the bits and pieces of our childhood for any memory for a sweet or treat that he favored. What we determined was that the cake would have to have peanuts or peanut butter, a simple classic yellow cake, dark chocolate and maybe caramel. Something like a snickers bar. What I ended up with was a four layer yellow cake with fresh banana filling, peanut butter mousse, and a dark chocolate ganache. Sorry. I can't do simple. Not worth my time.

I'm not a fan of yellow cake but this yellow cake was light, moist and fluffy thanks to an adaptation of a Cake Bible recipe. It was so light and fluffy, in fact, that if I were to make it again, I'd torte it in fewer layers so it could hold up a little better. This is a yellow cake that I'd gladly eat again and serve to my favorite people. The peanut butter mousse (by far my favorite part) tasted just like a Snickers ice cream bar. I could've eaten scoops of that stuff. The airy mousse paired perfectly with the fluffiness of the cake. I sliced up some ripe bananas to go in between the layers and topped the whole thing off with a my favorite dark chocolate ganache.

As an afterthought, I made some chocolate curls and melted some almond bark for the writing. We brought this cake to Dad's surprise birthday party and my uncle's sushi restaurant. There wasn't a teeny tiny piece left. I think he liked it.

One would think that having been a science major in college, and having worked in research all my adult life, I'd be better at documenting what it is I'm adapting in the kitchen. Alas, let's hope that I scribbled down on my stained and tatterred baking notepad how it was exactly that I formulated this creation so that the "experiment" can be repeatable...

Rainbow Velvet and Marshmallow Clouds

When I was a kid, I loved Lisa Frank stationary. Remember that stuff? It was bright and colorful, and even at age nine, when you should be a little too old for stickers, I had a sticker collection which consisted mostly of Lisa Frank and Sanrio stuff. This rainbow cake reminds me of a Lisa Frank collection and of being a kid. In fact, I believe I was humming the Reading Rainbow theme song while affixing the clouds onto the sky… “Butterflies in the sky, I can go twice as high…

A cousin of a friend of a friend (right?) was planning her daughter’s first rainbow themed birthday party and had this cake in mind. I was super excited, you have no idea. Lately I’ve gotten opportunities to challenge my skills and make things that I couldn’t justify doing just for fun. Except wedding cakes. When I start getting more than 4 hours sleep a night, I realize I’m just being a lazy blub, and I start making wedding cakes. Just for fun. I kid. It’s usually 5 hours of sleep. But these opportunities actually justify all my trips to Costco for embarrasing amounts of butter. 

 

I’ve made marshmallow clouds before and I think the idea is really really cute and I’m so glad I got to make them again. It’s just Martha’s piping marshmallow, with a 3/8” round tip (the same one I use for macarons) piped into free form cloud shapes. They are fixed onto the fondant cake with royal icing. I was pressed for time, however, and used a toothpick to hold the clouds on as the royal icing dried. I wish I could take credit for the cake topper, but this creative mommy actually ordered this figurine to be custom made to her little girl’s photo, favorite bear and birthday outfit! It’s just so insanely cute. It hurts.

I’ve been on a red velvet kick lately and I thought to make the cake a “rainbow velvet” which would have some of the same great “velvet” complexity. I used a double batch of my wedding cake recipe, omitting the cocoa and leaving the baking soda/vinegar emulsion to the end to be mixed separately for each portion before baking. Once the batter was mixed, I portioned out into seven bowls (using a scale) and mixed my colors in. Since I only have three 8” pans, the baking was done in three batches. Yes, I waited for each batch to cool enough, re-washed, re-greased, and re-parchmented. This is also where I learned that stacking your pans on two different levels in the oven results in uneven cake layers (no convection oven here) even when using cake strips. Luckily, with the thickness I needed the layers to be, I torted off essentially all of the unevenness. With seven layers, it was necessary to really get these even and level while building on them so they would be structurally sound as well as aesthetically pleasing. I used a ruler, as cake leveler and a cake knife to do it. A thinner layer of cream cheese frosting went in between to keep the layers from sliding around or icing from oozing out from the weight of the stack, but with seven layers, I was not worried that there wouldn’t be enough frosting to cake ratio.

The cake was complemented with a set of Lemon Cupcakes and Coconut Swiss Meringue Buttercream, which was a standard SMBC recipe with added reduced coconut milk.

I'll post the recipe soon-ish!...

Baker, Shaker, Wedding Cake Maker

A month ago, a friend asked me to make the cake for her daughter’s wedding and confirmed my standing suspicion that she was a little cuckoo. (Tooootally kidding! I love you, Liz!) I was honored and happily agreed… and as I thought and thought about it over the course of weeks leading up the wedding day, I realized that I was, in fact, the cuckoo-bird. I started to wake up in the middle of the night from dreams of the cake toppling, or being in a car wreck on the way to the reception, or even forgetting to bake the cake! Really, who do I think I am? I bake at home, purely for my own amusement. My mom pragmatically pointed out that this was someone’s wedding, and maybe just a little more than one of my fun little baking experiments. A wedding cake is one of the most important pieces of one of the most important events in two peoples' lives! No pressure or anything. But in the end, they had that much faith in me to have me do my first ever wedding cake and I always step up to a challenge. Anyways, I’ve watched enough Food Network Challenges to have it in the bag.

We decided to go with Red Velvet – as the bride is a big red velvet fan. The only catch was, this cake needed to be parve, and I know from my vegan sister, that subbing for dairy sometimes results in wonky tastes and textures. I went through a few recipes and test batches and put together my favorite Red Velvet, parve or not. Ever (recipe to be posted soon). I was also really inspired by Smitten Kitchen’s wedding cake and took advantage of many of her tips. And just like she said, my kitchen floor ended up disastrous. Maybe the kitchen walls too. Somewhere along the way, I knocked a bowl of red food color-cocoa emulsion from the counter. Splatter. Everywhere. I’m sure it really looked like a crime scene when my boyfriend came running in response to my shrill scream to discover a deep read puddle in the middle of the kitchen and me and everything in a five foot radius covered in forensic evidence. It’s really funny actually. Or twisted. As far as clean-up, I had three days of sleep to catch-up on and another wedding to attend the next day and decided to avoid going into my kitchen altogether. In fact, tonight I'll have to chose between doing dishes and disposable dining ware. My hands are still chapped from washing my mixer bowl 73 times. When the dust powdered sugar settled, there were piles and piles of emptied flour and sugar sacks, bottles of vanilla, buttery stick boxes, cocoa containers, shortening and tofutti tubs. I’ve never gone through so many baking supplies before. Not to mention cake boards and cake board foil and transporting boxes, pans and parchment. I literally multiplied my standard 8” cake recipe by 15 times. Read: 72 cups of batter. I needed a spreadsheet for these calculations. Now I get why wedding cakes are so expensive. Macarons too. Totally justified.

The wedding venue was a gorgeous historic building in Downtown LA, complete with marble balusters, a dramatic cascading staircase leading to a mezzanine and over 200 guests. I must admit, when I arrived to set up the cake and saw the crews of florists, caterers and lighting specialists running around, I started to get nervous. By the time I saw the showcased cake table and display of exotic fruits and desserts behind it, yogic breathing was all I could do to quell my shaking hands into piping the snail-trail trim on the cake. Ricardo from Luna Gardens, who was a delight, added the exquisite Black Magic roses to finish it off. 

I snapped some pictures and slipped out just as the valet guys were taking the first guests to pull up for the ceremony.

It’s an amazing feeling to have successfully pulled of my first wedding cake and I must give special thanks to my boyfriend. He picked up food for me when I forgot to eat, demanded that I take power naps (demanded – we were on the verge of a fight at my refusal to sleep) and made up my whole delivery team. Imagine the patience it takes to keep it together when you're driving a car full of wedding cake and your girlfriend is hyperventilating at every stop light you close in on. He completely believed I could do it and assured me the world would not implode if I didn’t.

Congratulations, Natlie & Ed