Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Conquering the Macaron!

Hey folks! Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but school has been hectic. In fact, today is my last day of class as a second-year law student! I still have finals next week, but then I'll be free for the summer. I have an internship lined up with a judge in the DC Superior Court, so that should be interesting.

But enough about me. This post is about singing my wife's praises as a first-class baker. She's tackled some pretty ambitious baking projects in the past, but a few weeks ago she was determined to make a French macaron, which is no simple task.


For my exposition on the differences between French macarons and American macaroons, you can see the post below. A French macaron is essentially a meringue cookie, and is quite fussy (like most French food). Here's a picture of a pistachio-flavored macaron that we had in New York, which was amazing. And so the quest began.


Here are the macarons that Sarah made. The entire process consisted of a number of ridiculous tasks, including but not limited to: grinding toasted almonds to dust, "aging" six egg whites by leaving them out on the counter for two days, buying a "silpat" mat so that the cookies could be pulled off the cookie sheet, making sure that the temperature of the oven never varied more than five degrees from the desired temperature, and so on.

However, I'm happy to say Sarah pretty much dominated in macaron-baking, and the end product was pretty awesome. Rock on.

3 comments:

Corndog said...

Talk about serendipity...my doctor just put me on a strict french macaron diet!
I think I'll change the word to
SARAH-N-DIPITY!
They look delicious! Certainly an appropriate treat for any out-of-town visitors.

Elysa said...

Way to go Sarah! We are avialable for taste-testing any time.

Kay said...

Wow, those look amazing Sarah! The Cafe Rio looked really yummy too. Makes me miss Provo.