Alana
For Christmas Katherine and I both pitched to get Theresa the Duchess Bake Shop Cookbook. If you’re unfamiliar with Duchess you’re missing out on life. It’s a local Edmonton patisserie that has receive some pretty significant recognition. It was featured in Buzzfeed’s article “23 Bakeries Around The World You Need To Eat At Before You Die”, and is a must-visit for Canadian PM Justin Trudeau when he is in Edmonton. Simply put, Duchess is phenomenal. Anyways, Theresa and I planned a Duchess baking date this past weekend, and picked a macaron gateaux recipe from their bake book to try out. Neither of us had tried to make macarons prior to our kitchen adventure, so this was definitely a learning experience!
The understanding I got from reading the recipes in the bake book, is that a macaron gateaux is a larger version of a macaron. Instead of making 1-1.5 inch blobs, we made ~4 inch circles using a round piping tip. We also used more than one kind of frosting, as well as fruit, to fill our gateaux. Really, it’s a pretty straightforward idea.
The trickiest part was making the macaron shells. We made two batches and had a few issues each time, mostly to do with the oven being too hot! I found this blog post by FoodNouveau to be quite helpful for improving our macaron process. Needless to say, perfecting macarons is a bit of a process. Who knew they were so tricksy?
We were very precise making our macaron templates!
For this particular gateaux we used a pistachio buttercream, cream cheese frosting, and strawberries. The pistachio buttercream was delicious and had a beautiful colour, but the extract was quite expensive. It would probably be worth using a different flavour, perhaps almond or lemon. We also found that the moisture from the strawberries made the macaron shells soggy if they weren’t consumed within a couple hours, which is a real shame. Make sure that you have some hungry people around to gobble these down when they’re done!
To me a macaron gateaux has endless possibilities. You could use any number of frostings, or ganache, or fruit. All you need is a macaron recipe, and a few cups of filling 🙂
Chateau Gateau 