Late last night on somewhat of a whim, I signed up for one of Sur La Table's cooking courses. The original $70 value for the class was marked down to less than $34.00... and I found myself thinking, "why not?" I signed up and went by myself, which proved to be a lot less daunting than I would have expected. The subject : French macarons.
The class was this morning and lasted for about 3.5 hours. We were instructed by a professional chef, who was absolutely amazing. She gave us a lot of information on French macarons and the different ways of preparing them. We even received little "cookbooks" with the recipes we used.
Our class had 16 people and we divided into groups, each focusing on a different flavor macaron. My group worked on lemon macarons with blueberry/lemon buttercream filling, another group worked on raspberry with white chocolate/rosewater filling, and there was also a group making cocoa macarons with a chocolate/mint ganache filling.
After making the batter for the outer cookie, we piped it very carefully onto cookie sheets, which had templates on them (we got lots of templates to take home). Often times, the piping would form a "nipple" on top of the cookie - a problem easily resolved by getting a dab of water on your finger and patting it down.
While the shells were in the oven, we worked on the buttercream. Filling is always my favorite part.
The mixer we used was an amazing Breville. Very high-tech and almost silent, even when on the highest speed. During a break, I wandered out and located it in the store. $300.00? No problem! (Just kidding :)
Since macarons are pretty temperamental, our chef instructor did most of the handling with the ovens.
You have to wait for them to cool completely so that they pop right off the cookie sheets - otherwise they tear and collapse!
Truly one of the prettiest baked goods I know of!
I got lots to take home!
I was very proud to have created these little goodies.
In the end, I loved the class and would definitely take more (if they go on sale and are in my affordability range again :).
I guess the class put me on a cooking kick, because once I got home I whipped up some carrot cake granola to last us for the week, and for dinner I had sweet potato veggie burgers using THIS recipe. It was my first time making these and they were a big hit with my family (who had made non-veggie burgers for their own dinner)! I made them slider size so they can be incorporated into my lunches this week during work.
At the end of it all I hopped on the spin bike, took a nice relaxing bath (my first bath in about a year!) and spent about 20 minutes stretching... 5k tomorrow! Heading to bed early tonight... haven't been able to catch up on sleep in the longest time!
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