Spring time in Paris... We wish!!

Happy First day of SPRING, which also coincides officially with macaron day here in Toronto.

 Lets get this party started, spring. We're tired of this dreary, cold, and wet weather and it's time for spring to, well, spring into action! Paul came back from his fabulous trip to Paris a few weeks back and now he just wants nothing but to be back in Paris. He ate great food, drank great wine, and walked all over Paris.

While there, Paul stumbled upon Ladurée and bought 6 macarons early on in his trip. They were so amazingly good that he recommends that if you're going to Paris, you NEED to stop there. I texted him asking to bring me back a dozen; alas, he couldn't find the store again and didn't bring any back. *cue dramatic music* 

 Paul showed me all his pictures of Paris that he posted on his Instagram account, under the hashtag #parisitshappening 

So we decided to try our hand at making our own marcarons. It's been a long time since I attempted to make macarons and this was Paul's first time. *cue scary, breath taking music!*

Macarons' seem really daunting to make. There are a lot of steps and many people have blogged tips and suggestions when making their own macarons. Do you sift the dry ingredients or do you just mix away. Do you let them sit and dry before baking or do you just throw them into the oven and hope for the best. And did you know that there are two types of macarons?! There are: French and Italian. What's the difference? Well, that's a good question. 

The French method has fewer steps and fewer tools needed. It does call for "aged egg whites" and more wait/dry time for the macarons before and after they cook.  

The Italian method is much more involved and you'll need to multitask while cooking. You'll need to make a sugar syrup, but the wait/dry times are less. Usually in the Italian macarons' you use an Italian buttercream as well. 

We decided to look through old copies of Food and Drink magazine, online, and pinterest to see if we could find a recipe that a) seemed easy enough and b) that we had all the ingredients for. The Sweet Spot's, Earl Grey Macarons with Blueberry compote buttercream; sounds good, right? I checked my pantry and we substituted a couple of things from The Sweet's Spot's recipe: Instead of Earl Grey tea we used English Breakfast, instead of the recommended blueberry compote buttercream (which is a fancy way of saying Italian buttercream); we just made a standard blueberry buttercream (because the egg whites weren't whipping into peaks!) *cue lots of swearing!* 

 So we learned a couple of things from today:

1) When making macarons, you need to schedule yourself lots of time to make them. Don't do what we did and decided at 7:45 that we should bake.

2) When the recipe says to let the piped macarons sit before baking; you let them sit! One tray sat for 15 minutes (which is longer than the recipe calls for) and the second tray we just threw in after piping. YES, you should definitely let them sit. The sitting process allows for the macrons to develop a "shell" that gives them a smooth top and will give them the "feet" around the bottom edge. If you don't let them sit, your macarons will show the piping marks, will fall a bit when cooling, and won't form the "feet" around the bottom edge.

3) To try and make the macarons similar in size, we traced a shot glass onto the back of the parchment paper. Technically this would be a great idea if Paul was better at piping; but this was all experimental.

4) We don't have a solution for this one; but our egg whites wouldn't form peaks. We tried the Kitchen Aid stand mixer, the hand mixer, and even using a whisk. Nothing seemed to work. OK, out with the Italian buttercream and in with a regular buttercream - which I am an expert at making.

Would we make these again... No. We'd rather buy them from an expert who knows exactly what they're doing and we'd rather do what we're both really good at doing: eating macarons!!

Did you know it's organic?

Not to repeat the title, but did you know that it's organic? The zucchini, that is.  Grown from my garden this past summer.  I had so much of it that I had to freeze it. So zucchini, as organic as it is; it doesn't really connect to Parisian baking, so we'll put our Parisian theme on the back burner (get it, a cooking pun!).

So zucchini... what do you do with zucchini? Well, it grills up really well, it's a great substitute for certain pastas, and you can sneak it into chocolate cake! Yes, you read that right, chocolate cake. Since we're adding zucchini to the cake, we thought that we should try to make a healthier version of it, but with all the flavour of regular chocolate cake. Also, my husband has been complaining about all the zucchini in my freezer for the past 6 months.  Therefore for the sake of my marriage, we decided we better bake with the zucchini tonight.

Paul and I looked through a couple of cook books and weren't really happy with what we found. I decided that we were seasoned enough to make our own recipe up and pulled out my copy of Secrets of Fat-Free Baking and started looking at what we could improvise. But before we get to the good stuff, I want to share with you my apple sauce recipe that we used as a substitute for the fat (butter or oil).

Apple Sauce

5 Apples (McIntosh were what I had on hand)
1/2 tsp Cinnamon

Peel, core, and slice the apples and place in a saucepan. Add the cinnamon and cook at medium-high heat until the apples turn into mush (technical terms). Ta-Da!! Applesauce!

This is our Healthier (as healthy as chocolate cake can get) Chocolate Cake

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

For the cake:
1/4 cup of apple sauce
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup white sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
2 tsp coffee granules
1/2 cup buttermilk
2 cups zucchini
3 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chopped

1.  Preheat your oven to 325F.  Grease a 9" x 13" pan.
2.  In mixing bowl, cream together the apple sauce, vegetable oil and the sugars. Beat until well incorporated.
3.  Add the vanilla and eggs and continue beating until well mixed.
4.  In another bowl, combine the baking soda, salt, baking powder, flour and cocoa powder.  Give it a good stir.
5.  Add the dry ingredients to the wet in 3 additions alternating with the buttermilk.
6.  Stir in the coffee, zucchini and chocolate.
7.  Bake for 30-35 mins or until a skewer comes out clean

Cool the cake and start the frosting. This is where the health-kick kind of starts to fade...

Chocolate Frosting

6oz of Semi-Sweet Chocolate
1/2 cup Coconut Milk
1/2 cup Icing Sugar

Set a double boiler on medium heat and melt the chocolate. Add in the coconut milk and icing sugar and take off heat while mixing. Voila, frosting!

Paul was skeptical, as usual; but I pushed on and am pretty happy with how this turned out! Not bad for our first attempt at creating a recipe. The consensus on this recipe is that we'd make it again but next time call it a brownie, since it reminded us more so of that than a cake.

We even tried to fancy up the presentation. What's fancier than maraschino cherries? Nothing! 

On se prepare pour Paris

"Hey, what do you want to bake this week?"
"How about something French-inspired"
"Why?"
"Because I'm going to Paris!"
"What?! You lucky bastard!"

So to celebrate Paul getting ready for a short séjour to Paris, we decided to make choux à la crème (cream puffs). Light, fluffy, heavenly cream filled puffs of deliciousness.  Paul thought this would be so difficult... but I convinced him that it was easier than he thought; and of course I was right.

To make the mood even more French, Paul turned on his BRAND NEW record player and we listened to Edith Piaf and ate chocolate (can I tell you the Dairy Milk Marvellous Creations Jelly Popping Candy is all kinds of awesome/the worst idea for diets ever).

The cream puffs are surprisingly easy to make with few ingredients.  First you need to start with the choux paste:

Choux Paste

250 ml of water
1/2 cup of butter
5 g of salt
185 g of all purpose flour (or bread flour)
6 eggs

1.  Preheat your oven to 400F
2.  In a saucepan place the water, butter and salt and bring to a boil. Don't put a lid on the pot when bringing to a rolling boil; the butter will turn frothy.
3.  Add the flour and stir until the paste is formed and it pulls away from the sides of the pot. Take the saucepan off the heat.
4.  Place the dough in a mixing bowl and mix to cool.  When no more steams comes out of the choux paste, you can move to step 5.
5.  Add eggs one by one until fully incorporated. 
6.  Pipe using star shape and bake for about 30 minutes until golden.

Yes, 30 minutes seem like a really long time but if you pull them out sooner, the puffs will have an eggy-taste and no one wants that!

Once all your Choux Paste have been baked, it's time to start the filling. We decided to stick with the classic and made a whip cream filling.

Whip Cream

500 ml of  cream
40g of icing sugar
a splash of vanilla extract

Mix all the ingredients together with a whisk until stiff peaks form. 

Cut the puff pastries in half using a seraded knife and fill with the whip cream filling (we used a star shape pipping tip again).

Once finished, you can dust icing sugar like we did or make a chocolate ganache (we wanted to make the ganache but it was 9:00 pm and we both have to work tomorrow). These will probably not make it to work tomorrow!