french kissing

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

I've never made macarons before. Not to get them confused with macaroons, which are the American version made with coconut. These however, were fantastic. They're made with almond flour or meal (recipe here). And apparently they're really hard. Well- I didn't find them really hard to make yummy, but I did find it difficult to make them pretty. These are delicious- chewy, sweet, and almond. I do think that you have to think carefully about the flavors and filling, because I can easily imagine this becoming sickeningly sweet and therefore not as yummy.

Take 1: Plain almond macarons with an orange dark chocolate ganache filling. Okay, except bumpy and cracked.

Take 2, part 1: Green tea macarons with plain dark chocolate ganache filling. Better, but not as much rise, and still many were cracked. But these are definitely my favorite- not too sweet, and I love the green tea/chocolate/almond combination.

Take 2, part 2: cinnamon apple macarons with plain dark chocolate ganache filling. Almost complete failure. Some of them burned, almost all of them cracked- if not while baking, then while trying to remove them from the sheet. And they were a little on the sweet side.

Someone made a bacon macaron with cream cheese/cheddar filling. I don't know how I feel about that, because the cookie base is mostly egg whites and sugar. But it's intriguing. The one I really really want to try is a pumpkin pie macaron, but the grocery store was out of pumpkin. (I KNOW, right??)

snug as a bug in a rug

Finally finished my rug:

It's about 2.5 ft in diameter, a pretty decent sized rug. Though I sewed the tube together a bit too tight so it kind of curls up unless you pat it down when you pick it up and put it back down again.

My sister was like "why are you making a rug?? you should make something useful!" only seriously, what was I going to do with the colors that went into this rug? I certainly didn't have enough of anything to make anything else, and at least here the colors are supposed to be a little odd.

Projects: mittens for my sister, and possibly Christmas presents for the rest of my family. Not that it's easy to think of something to knit for my parents, because they don't really use any of the stuff I've made them in the past. :P