Macaronage in the New Year

hello, blogosphere!!! : D
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okay, so I'm a bit new around here. I don't really know how things work, what I'm doing, or if anyone besides me will ever read this. but, late last year (oh, say.... eleven days ago?) I resolved to create a blog to chronicle my baking adventures. as a play-at-home mommy, i don't have lots of free time to bake during the day. and i find that most nights i am so pooped that all i want to do is veg on my couch and watch friends re-runs while stuffing my face with whatever is within arm's reach. SO not pretty!

but, after especially tiring and stressful days, all I want to do is BAKE. yes, bake.

all I want to do is carefully measure out my dry ingredients and level off my velvety soft cake flour with a mini rubber spatula. and cream an entire 1 lb. block of butter with generous amounts of sugar and watch it churn, churn, churn in my BFF, my lime green Kitchen Aid stand mixer. i want to separate egg whites from their yolks and giddily plot the ways I will use them later: a yellow cake with the yolks? swiss meringue buttercream with the whites, perhaps?

in short, baking is my therapy! it is a necessity in my life. alcoholics have their alcohol, I've got my cupcakes. seriously, I will go to Costco and buy 4 lbs. of unsalted butter, 60 eggs, and a 10 lb. bag of sugar, thinking that I'll be smart and stock up for the month. umm, yeah. it barely lasts me a couple of weeks. I just can't. stop. baking.

I think it's called passion. and if I love it and it keeps me from ravaging up and down the streets maniacally out of stress, why the heck not! right? : )

so there it is. that's why I'm here. I'll do my best to keep you (whoever you are) updated with my baking successes and even failures because, let's be honest, I screw up recipes almost as often as I get 'em right! haha!

here's my latest baking endeavor, also a new year's resolution for 2012: macarons. by the end of this year I will perfect the French macaron! the ones pictured here are almond-based with pink and lavender food colorings. the macaron shell recipe is by Helene from Tartelette, whom I absolutely adore! I have a total baker's crush on her. haha! the filling is a lemon cream cheese mixture that I made with 8 oz. of cream cheese, 1/2 a stick of unsalted butter, 1/2 cup of confectioner's sugar, sifted, and the juice and zest of one lemon. although they weren't all as pretty as I would have liked them to be, there was a handful that looked good enough to give away to my dear friend J, who is expecting her first baby girl in May. Yay! : D

after reading this article by BraveTart I braved a little experiment of my own. In the first batch of macarons I added two drops of pink liquid food coloring to meringue before I added in the dry ingredients. and to the second batch I added 1/2 a tablespoon of powdered lavender food coloring to the dry ingredients before mixing it in with the meringue. Both batches came out equally inconsistent (it makes sense if you think about it) with half being cracked, puffy, and lacking feet, and the other half being perfectly respectable looking macarons with hard shells and chewy middles. *shrug*

I also used egg whites that had aged for one week in the refrigerator and did not leave my macaron batter to harden. at all. I simply piped them and stuck them straight into the oven. honestly? I don't think it made a difference at all! I do believe, however, that my oven temp may have been a little high, which would explain the cracks. or not. what a mystery!

lucky for you, I will try again and post the results back here asap! to tie you over until then, just in case you wanted to try your hand at making some macarons yourself, here is a macaron template I created to assist in piping even little macarons. place it under your silpat or parchment paper before piping and remove it before you stick the pan in the oven. enjoy!

download the macaron circles template