Chai filled makecarons-3

A few weeks back I had the opportunity to try Francois Payard’s “MakeCaron™” box, which contained the ever so elusive macaron shells.

The third-generation pastry chef, Payard, is a very well respected French pastry chef with pastry shops all over the world. Francois Payard has made macarons all of his life, just as his father and grandfather did. He introduced them to NYC in 1993 and now he wants America to take over the flavors.

Chai filled makecarons-2

Payard’s creation, MakeCaron, which launched in November last year, is basically the base cookie of macarons. After watching dozens of “make your own” macaron videos and reading articles online, Francois realized that macaron shells are very temperamental in the regular kitchen (I can vouch for that- with my own set of failures at attempting macarons and the occasional successes). Plus he felt there are plenty of steps and small details to take into consideration to achieve perfect consistency which might not be everyone’s ball game.

Chef Payard thinks that “if you make burgers, you don’t bake the buns”. So, why not have the same concept for macarons.

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Hazelnut Macarons with Hazelnut Chocolate Ganache by The Novice Housewife #macarons

When I was in Canada, I took a macaron making class from the Bonnie Gordon College, the same place where I was doing my cake decorating course, and thought I will share my learnings from that class today. I have seen videos and had read many tutorials before I attempted my first macarons, but to see and feel in person how exactly the macaronage should look was why I took the class and am glad that I did.

I have only once before posted (in passing) about macarons and well another time, if you count my post on my failed attempt at making macarons (both posts were before I took the class). The last few times I have tried my hand at macarons, I have been having a fair amount of success and even though I am still not an expert on it, and hope to practice as much as I can and get better, I thought I will share the recipe, tips, resources and sites that have helped to get me a successful batch of macarons.

As mentioned before since I am still fairly new at making macarons, I still feel I am inexperienced to write a post on successful macaron making and thought I will leave it to the experts to help you out. If you are new at making macarons, or have had trouble I suggest you go through the following two posts that I am sure will be helpful to you.

These two people have summed up in quite a lot of detail the ins and outs of making macarons at home. Please do check them out before you make your own batch.

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bg4Its not that I have been absent because I don’t have recipes to share (in fact, I have quite a few piling up), it’s just that I have ten thousand things going on in my mind right now, and since each thought is more absurd than the next, I just wasn’t able to blog. Probably not blogging for so long has got me in a blogging rut as well and hence the writers’ block or whatever this is. But I guess I just need to jump back into it.

Kind of like cooking. For the first three days back from Canada I cooked absolutely nothing, relying solely on the frozen buffalo chicken wings and spicy black bean burgers that V had stocked up on while I was away for our meals. Three days later I took baby steps to cooking and now I am back in full swing (on most days). Except that on Monday I cut my finger real bad and had to go to urgent care to get my skin glued back and a tetanus shot as well, which left me more or less incapacitated to do anything and gave me an excuse to just louse around.

Now since I am better and I do have a lot of things to share, especially about my trip to Canada I thought I will just fill you in with all the stuff I learnt and made during my two month course at Bonnie Gordon College, and since I am not in the mood of writing too much (yup, this is when I am not in the mood), this one will be a picture heavy post. The picture on the left at the top (the very first pic of the post) is the cake I did as part of my Haute Couture assignment. We had to be inspired by haute couture and translate it to a cake. I chose to do a cake inspired by an Indian designer duo’s collection (Meera and Muzaffar Ali’s Jamazeb Collection). I really wanted to do a lehenga cake and thought it would be fun to practice the fabric like draping on the cake.

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