Gillespie Treehouse: Macaron Making

So...I turned into my Dad a little bit this week.

This was a surprise, to say the least. My Mom - yes. Without a doubt I'm turning into my Mom. Sometimes I open my mouth, and my Mom comes out! I mean, who drives with a fresh hot cup of coffee in a normal mug? My Mom. Me.Who has bags and bags of coupons in their car? My Mom. Me.

But my Dad, that was a surprise!

I decided if I'm going to make macarons, I'm going to have all the right tools. No stumbling around trying to figure out whats holding us back. No weekly tests to determine the problem. [That's the Dad part].

So, we now own:
- An oven thermometer. ... Our oven apparently runs 50 degrees cooler than it's supposed to... good to know!
- A macaron silicon mat. This was a huge help in sizing - gave us consistency and something to guide us.
- A food scale. This blew my mind, but more on that later.
- A hand sifter. Previously we only had a triple sifter, which is obnoxiously painful on your arm, but also had raspberry seeds stuck in it from our copy cat Ruth's Chris raspberry martini. Yum!

This week we followed this recipe from my new favorite blog.

We used the pumpkin buttercream frosting we made the week before.

Food: We finished up the wine from last week -- but next week -- we have French wine to try!
Music: We listened to accordion music -- now Josh wants an accordion. And he is talented enough to pull it off, but still, not high on my list. :)
French-ness: I finally introduced Josh to the movie Amelie -- shout to out my SIL, Bethany, and my college roommate, Bonne. We only made it part way - we will finish another week.

Ok, so this blew me away. And I'm sure I'm late to the party on this one, but just ignore me if you knew this and never told me. Ok - I know dry and liquid measuring cups are different - truly I do - but I cheat sometimes. It's so much easier to pour sugar into the liquid measuring cup with a larger mouth and extra space rather than pouring EXACTLY into a dry measuring cup. Am I the only one? Anyways -- so we got this scale (mostly because most macaron recipes use grams).

This picture is showing my 320 grams of powdered sugar. Boring, I know. But look closely, you can see 320 grams (8 ounces) is more accurately 20 ounces in my liquid measuring cup!!! Ahh - seriously?? I had no idea it would be more than double the amount in a liquid cup. I'm seriously in shock - I've been baking like this my whole life.

{I just did a quick side experiment before publishing this for the world....I took a dry measuring cup, liquid measure cup, my scale and powered sugar.

I looked up how many ounces are in a 1/4 cup. (2 ounces) and then how many grams are in 2 ounces (56.699 grams).

I scooped out 1/4 cup of powered sugar with my DRY measuring cup (technically the correct thing to do). I poured that into my liquid measuring cup, just to see -- it was a slightly "fluffy" 1/4 cup and 2.3 ounces, roughly. BUT on the scale --- only 39 grams! 18 grams off the mark! Seriously? That's almost a 3rd off.

Let's just say I recommend a scale.}

This is how our peaks looked. And when you see the finished product, you might say we over whipped? (Hopefully Josh doesn't read this...)

My pastry chef man!

See how uniform and perfect they are? Love our macaron baking mat! [My girlfriend did say that her finished product is much larger than mine, and she thinks they are less dry when larger. I personally don't find ours dry but I'd like to try larger in the future]

As I now know, "feet" are supremely important in the world of macarons. This is a peak at our babies in the oven - WITH FEET! At this point, I started to jump around shouting "They have feet, they have feet!"