Chinese New Year Wontons

A belated "Gong Hay Fat Choy!"

This year I celebrated by making a big batch of wontons.  Yum.  I started with this recipe, which turned out really well.  I added veggies and wonton noodles to the broth, and then topped it off with a drizzle of sesame oil, which really took me back to the Cantonese noodle shops the last time I visited China.

These wonton froze really well and I've already polished off the last of the batch.  I should make more soon.  It makes me feel more Chinese to know I can cook up some yummy Chinese noms when I want to.

Calligraphy and Ting Tongs

It's another new year and we started it off with a trip to the Asian Art Museum to see their Chinese calligraphy exhibit.  It was just the momentum I needed as I'm deep in my planning for Project Apricot!  I'm super excited about Chinese calligraphy again and will soon bust out my supplies to start practicing again.  It'll be great.  Really.

I really like Chinese as a written art form.  The above is standard script, but I especially love the semi-cursive and cursive writing.

I also recently made some home-made Ding Dongs (which I named Ting Tongs) for a friend who was lamenting the demise of the Hostess company.  I followed this recipe and it came out pretty tasty (and no shady chemicals or preservatives).  It was definitely messy, but yummy and won thumbs up from everyone who tried one.

New macaron books!

Yay!  Presents from mom and dad!

 

and fresh off the pre-order list...

And this one was a present from Hoyt :)  (Thank you!)

There are some interesting looking flavor combinations in here.  I can't wait to try a different ganache recipe too.  Will post the results of my experiments when I get a chance to make another batch.

matcha azuki macaron

The macaron is not the featured dessert here, but still the combination intrigues me and I might try that mousse recipe and see how it goes at the center of the macaron.

match azuki entremet

macaron update

I made another batch of macarons this weekend with great success!

It took half a day to make a batch on my own.  I did half a batch of mango ganache filling and half batch of red bean paste filling.

The mango ones turned out perfect, but the red bean paste ganache didn't chill long enough and was runny at first.  The red bean ones were also on parchment paper instead of the silpat and also came out mis-shapened.

I had no problems with oven bake times.  I put the oven on 300 degrees and baked the biscuits in the top-middle rack about 16 minutes total.

The macarons were good but still a bit too sweet.  I think next time we can cut back on the powered sugar and compensate for the same amount of almond meal so the dry mass stays the same.

Oh and here's a recipe I found from a blog and it has pink bunny macarons.  Cute.  I will try to do some fun shapes again soon, but a bit differently.


Easter Bunny Macarons

latest macaron news

We hauled ass the weekend of 3/26-27 and made 2 full batches of Italian-meringue macarons for a fundraising bake sale at work.

It was a spectacular success and people seemed to really enjoy them.  Though it made me nervous when French people bought one since I'd imagine they would have even higher expectations.

The flavors we made:
- red bean paste ganache (stumbled onto this recipe which happened from Thip's blog.  we had just taken a class from Thip 2 weeks before.  yummy!  will try just straight red bean paste sometime too.)
- mango ganache (I cooked down some mango puree for the flavoring.  really good!)
- lychee filling (cooked down and blended some canned lychee.  it got easily overpowered by the white chocolate flavor.  I ended up making a pretty pulpy lychee filling.)
- white chocolate ganache (pretty simple and pretty good)

We ran into some trouble with getting the macaron shells to cook fully.  Baking the standard 8-10 minutes seems to leave it a bit gooey on the inside.  We ended up baking them at least 20 minutes.
- is our oven weak?
- does it make a difference that our heating element is on the top?
- or is it okay that it's a bit gooey on the inside at first?  will it cool and harden?

Italian macaron class

For my birthday, Michael signed us up for a macaron class taught by a pastry chef in San Francisco.  We went this last weekend and, in a group of 6, finally got some formal training :)

pictures coming soon.  recipe is after the page break.  here are the results of our labor. 

The flavors were

• strawberry balsamic
• passion fruit
• yuzu
• coffee
• chocolate
• peanut butter

I'm excited to try this again and experiment with some flavors.  I have a few ideas: ginger peanut butter, lavender, earl grey, key lime, rose water.