More macaron practice

I've spent the last month or so practicing the art of French macarons. With my colleagues and teammates as taste testers, I've found a couple of buttercream fillings that I think work well with the sweet almond flavor of the shells.

Last week, I made a lemon curd buttercream and a dark chocolate buttercream to accompany the robin egg blue macarons I made a few weeks before (macarons stay very fresh when frozen after baking them).

As far as the shells go, I'm getting more and more consistent at getting smooth tops and firm feet. There are just a few other things I'm still learning like letting the macarons dry out in the air more before baking. This helps them bake fully on the inside without browning the bottoms.

:^)

HR Diagram French Macarons

Every year, our astronomy department has a summer barbecue. It's one of the largest events we have since almost everyone is there and brings their families. The most recent one was in June 2016 (I know, practically last week! I'm still catching up on the posts) and I wanted to make something different.

I was looking through some french macaron templates (sheets of 8.5 by 11 inch paper that you place under parchment paper to guide how large each macaron is) and I noticed the 2.5-inch circle template. Typical macrons are 1.5 inches in diameter, so the 2.5-inch template caught my attention and made me wonder what reason I could have to make macarons so large. So, I thought of a reason: stars!

Stars are circular and the come in a range of sizes. Well, actually they're spherical, but when they are projected on the sky, they look circular, but that's a technical detail. Stars also range in sizes that are not scaled down very well to 1 to 2.5-inch macarons...at least not in linear space. So after some internal debating, I figured that this star-macaron analogy would work so long as I accepted the fact the macarons would be to scale if I plot--err, I mean bake them logarithmically. As in, the 2.0-inch macarons are 100 times larger than the 1.0-inch macarons in logarithmic scales. Yes, these are the details I worry about when I'm baking something related to astronomy.

You can take things one step further if you add color to the macarons, use this color as a proxy for temperature, and the let the sizes of the macarons represent luminosity. Now we have all the ingredients for an HR diagram. The HR is short for Hertzsrpung and Russell, who were two astronomers who devised a way to show how stars change relating their temperature and luminosity. An HR diagram looks something like this:

This is a color-magnitude diagram I made for Science Buddies a couple years ago. It is essentially the same as an HR diagram where each point is a star and as a population, we can see the star's luminosity (G magnitude here) change with its temperature (color here).The European Southern Observatory has a prettier version of this.

With my idea finally in place, I got to work creating an HR diagram of french macarons:

These are aged egg whites whipped into a meringue and dyed red with gel based food dye.

The red macarons became M-dwarf and red giant stars. I also made blue, yellow, and orange macarons to represent other kinds of stars from those like the Sun to blue sub-giant stars.

These are some "action shots" of me piping the macarons onto parchment paper. Piping bag in one hand, camera in the other. I felt really cool doing this. You can see the 1.5-inch template through the parchment paper.

and here's the finished product:

I filled all of the macarons with a vanilla buttercream and colored the buttercream accordingly. The OBAFGKM at the top is yet another (I think we've covered 3 so far) way astronomers classify stars besides color and temperature. Here's how the final display looked at the BBQ.

 I left these at the food table and got in line and by the time I got to the table, they were all gone, so I think people appreciated them.

:^)

Stellar Nebula Cake

There is a recipe in this book I have by James Peterson that makes a chocolate devil's food cake with a whipped cream filling and white chocolate topping. I noticed the white chocolate topping and thought, "I could decorate that somehow!" My idea was to melt the chocolate and pour it on the cake and put a spiral design in it to resemble a galaxy. But I'm getting ahead of myself, first I had to make the cake!

The process of making the cake reminded me a lot of brownies, namely the part where you melt the chocolate together with butter (and sour cream in this recipe!). The sour cream helps keep the cake moist, I think, which is especially helpful for a chocolate cake. This isn't the cake that I decorated, though. You see, the recipe suggested that I only butter and flour the bottom and sides of my spring-form pan. However, most of that seemed to absorb into the cake while it baked, meaning when I tried to turn the cake out of the pan as the recipe called for, the cake broke in half (first time that's happened in 8 years and something like 15-20 different cakes baked). To remedy this, I put together a special improvised mixture of sugar and water to make a syrup as glue. I could now use my pastry brush to apply the syrup to the sundered cake halves and restore them to unity.

Okay, not really, I just made another cake, this time ignoring the pan preparations the recipe suggested and using a buttered piece of parchment paper in the pan:

Anyway, (notice the spelling without an "s", because that's the correct way; sorry, I'll turn the sass off now) the next step is to slice the cake into layers, use that syrup (it's real, right there in that white bowl with the brush on top) to brush each layer, and fill the layers with a stabilized whipped cream. That is basically just whipped cream with a small amount of gelatin added so it won't absorb as easily into the cake (like that flour and butter did...). Once the final layer of cake was in place, the entire cake is sealed with the whipped cream and left to chill for a few hours.

While that happened, I began setting up for decorating the white chocolate topping. I wanted to color it somehow to make a spiral design on it, but I knew melted chocolate could be tricky to work with. If I decided to pour the chocolate on the cake and then add drops of dye to it, I would have to work fast to do a design before the chocolate cooled, I figured. So instead, I tried something I saw in this video for french macarons. Basically the idea was to streak food dye across a sheet of plastic wrap and pour the melted chocolate onto it. Then roll the plastic around the chocolate and place this into a piping bag with a piping tip:

This didn't quite scale up to a cake from french macarons (as the technique was designed for), and it more turned out like this:

Not a spiral, but with some help of a toothpick, I think I got something like a stellar nebula (or whatever pleases the imagination, really). One could even imagine that the chocolate cake represents the dark matter that is ever-present throughout the cosmos. I also added cake crumbs (interstellar dust often found in nebulae?) derived from the first iteration of the chocolate cake along the side. In the end, the presentation was okay and the flavor was delightful. Chocolate and whipped cream make a great combination.

:^)

Cosmic Macarons

When I decided to use four different colors for these macarons, I figured that would mean about 4 times the effort when making these. I guess I got lucky because it turned out to only be around 3 times the effort...sure I made 4 mini-meringues, 4 measurements of almond flour and powdered sugar, and 4 separate piping bags, but I only had to pipe everything onto the baking sheets once. That's what I call efficiency. In all seriousness, I did have to be careful to get the consistency right each time I mixed the quarter-recipe of dry ingredients into the quarter-recipe of meringues (this macaron "batter" is called a macaronage). As most recipes that I've seen will say, you'll want the macaronage to have the consistency of lava, which we all have first-hand experience with, I'm sure.

One last thing on consistency: using finely ground almond flour is important. The brand I buy isn't as finely ground as I like it to be, as in, it does not all go through the sifter I use. As a result, I always pre-sift all of my almond flour and separate the coarse and fine almond pieces into different bags.

Once I run out of finely ground almonds, I use a blender to grind the coarse pieces until they fit through the sifter. If all of that goes correctly, the macaronage is well-mixed, and the piping is done, we get this:

Now for the fun part. After these were baked, I rather spontaneously thought that adding some constellations to these with white icing would be great. These should resemble Leo, Ursa Major, Orion, Pisces, Virgo, and Scorpius; I suggest squinting to convince yourself of their cosmic origins.

Oh yes, and these are filled with a raspberry buttercream!

I think for the extra effort, these cosmic macarons are worth it. They can be so beautiful depending on the colors you choose to mix together and they lend themselves well to further decoration once the shells are done.

:^)

Sponge Cake and French Macarons

I suppose I'll just get started here. Yesterday was Pi Day and I did a little something to celebrate it:

I brought the cake and macarons into the astronomy department for this thing we have called Cookie Hour. Normally it's at 4:00pm, but for Pi Day, we had it at 1:59pm, naturally.

The cake is a two-layer genoise sponge cake with recipe by Mary Berry from The Great British Bake Off. This show is particularly good because it's like a cooking class disguised as a baking competition. Season One is on Netflix ;). Anyway, the sponge cake is filled with a vanilla pastry cream and topped with a bittersweet chocolate ganache. I weighed the cake with the macarons on it and, coincidently, it's exactly 3.14lbs!

The macarons are plain (meaning no extra flavoring beyond their natural sweet almond allure) and I adhered them to the cake with a marshmallow filling I made with a meringue, corn syrup, and some stovetop heat. The macarons were a bit under mixed, so they did not come out as smooth as they should be. I use Mindy Cone's book for these. By the way, the parchment paper I used is by Nordic Ware and it is the best quality parchment I've found in about 8 years of baking.

I'll probably use the next few posts to talk about some of the things I've baked in the past and give my experience making them. I'm hoping to lead into space-themed baked goods at some point.

The cake isn't 3.14lbs; I never weighed it.

:^)