We just made our first $55!

Hello all! Sorry for the non existent blog as of late.  Both Jenn and I have been busy getting sick, recovering from being sick, entertaining guests, oh and making our first macaron sale!  That's right you heard me: we are somewhat semi-official. 

It all started last month when Jenn was having lunch with a friend...long story short, we were asked to provide macarons for an upcoming party.  We said yes.  Actually I think it was, "Hell Yes!"  We were stoked, people wanted to buy stuff we were making, it was kind of surreal.   A fancy party wanted some of our macarons. 

Well, last Wednesday the battle began, and when I say battle, I mean hellacious battle.  The Battle of the Jenns' sanity. It was us versus the macarons and the cookies almost won.

It all started innocently enough with me showing up at Jenn's house to start our baking.  We had each made a batch of Swiss butter cream (I made vanilla bean, Jenn: mandarin orange) that morning at our houses so we could just focus on the shells of the macarons, which are really the most important part of the cookie. We starting with the dreaded circle piping:

Jenn has way more patience for this than I.  If it were up to me, I would free hand EVERYTHING in my life. Luckily I have Jenn to show me that we sometimes need structure.

Then we piped cookies:

So far so good.

Then we took our first batch out of the oven and they were a disaster:

Cookies should have bottoms, as a general rule.

We were perplexed. Not once had Jenn nor I had so many issues when making these fussy little French cookies, but every problem known to man was happening to us, batch after batch.  We were starting to panic.  Then we finally had a perfect batch:

After this, it was hit or miss.  It basically took us 6 hours to make 55 cookies and by the end, since they are French, we decided we needed to start being rude to them before they went into the oven.  "F-you cookies", we would both yell as we closed the oven door.  This seemed to do the trick.  By the end of the day we had all the cookies we needed--barely.

Sanity restored.

It feels strange, we still haven't cashed our check, but I am thinking now that maybe we should have it bronzed.

-Jenny

Macaron Madness

I'm officially making this a disease, and I don't care if no one has ever heard of it.  Here are the symptoms of the madness:

• An inability to sleep at night thinking about powdered sugar and wonder how on earth you could have gone through 6 pounds of it in one week
• Making more than 3 batches of macarons a day
• Somehow think it's the dogs fault when you have over baked your macarons
• Decorating your macarons with candy hearts- just don't do it, it somehow make them look like little cookie hookers - pictures below of me doing it
• Giving your Silpat the stink eye when they (the cookies) stick after baking
• Eating macarons all day, every day and then forcing them down your friends throats

Today, I had this grand idea to make some light pink- baby pink if you will- macarons with a chocolate ganache filling flavored with raspberry extract.  The dog and I were on the hunt for the extract, that being the only thing on earth that I currently don't stock in my pantry, and the raspberry extract gods were not with us today. So I made regular ganache, no biggie.

After I had made a perfect batch of macaron batter I added some pink.  Now I use the gel food colors as to not water down the batter and I put in the perfect amount, it was the pink of baby cheeks, absolutely perfect.  Then they came out of the oven.  Peach.  Does peach scream Valentine's Day to you?  Actually there is only one person I can think of that would still think they are pink, yay color blindness!  Sorry Robert, that was uncalled for.  So what's a girl to do with all these peach cookies?  Why slap some candy hearts on of course. 

Here are the little street walkers now

After all this, I thought why not make a batch of chocolate macarons?  I had never tried adding cocoa powder to the batter, so why not try it now?  My friend has an office bake-off on Monday so I am trying to help him come up with something to bring in.  I also thought I might add some raspberry jam in the middle of the ganache filling since I couldn't find the extract and I LOVE that flavor combination.

I also started playing with painting on colors and adding gold dust after baking

Now that I have finished baking and decorating, I still feel like I have another batch in me.  Screw the laundry. 

-Jenny