Chateau Gateau

Roopa

As per usual, I prematurely volunteered myself to bake for a work event and didn’t plan well or leave myself much time. It was a high tea, and after waffling between several options I decided on madeleines. I considered macarons, but I felt a bit nervous making them without having tested them in my kitchen before and didn’t think I had enough time. Obviously, being shambles and unprepared, I didn’t think about this enough in advance to Amazon myself a madeleine pan; rather, I unsuccessfully went to four different stores and realized I was stuck making macarons. And I had even less time since I wasted hours madeleine pan shopping. Le sigh.

As you can see from the above picture, my macarons were hardly the picture of perfection (and that was by FAR the best looking one, obviously). Truthfully, I wasn’t too upset by this. I haven’t baked something challenging in a while, so I’m actually excited to have a goal to work towards!

I used this macaron recipe from Bravetart with a lemon white chocolate ganache. I definitely did not give myself enough time to make these, as the ganache was WAY too runny to pipe. I made a mess of these macarons, my kitchen, and my shirt in the process of icing these bad boys. Oops.

Rather than rehash the recipe, I’m going to go over the things that I did wrong and future steps I intend to take.

• In my intentness on double sifting the dry ingredients, I forgot to actually mix them together. Whoops, but easily remedied.
• I struggled to effectively deflate the batter (and consequently got a lot of cracked tops). I ordered a different kind of spatula to try improve this.
• In my hastiness, I put both pans in the oven at the same time. Rookie mistake Roopa. Rookie mistake.
• I didn’t leave the cookies out for long enough before baking them. I’ve heard a lot of very conflicting things on the necessity of this step, but based on the relative humidity levels in Vancouver, I feel like it might help.

I’m ready for attempt 2! Also, I still have an obscene amount of ganache in my fridge that needs to be utilized.