Macaron Marathon

Over the weekend Meishan and I talked about baking macarons. Actually, over the last week, or two weeks, or few weeks... I can't remember anymore because I always talk about making macarons, haha! Mei could not figure out my obsession with making them.

Over the Christmas holidays, Adrienne and Stephanie came over and we made Earl Grey macs. Haha, despite grounding the tea leaves up really fine, they tasted really gritty so we named them hemp macs, LOL! Our lemon buttercream was slaughtered because I couldn't get the butter to cream -_-" so those were considered my 6th (failed) batch.

Back to Mei. Determined to make them again now, she came over Friday night and we started our macaron baking marathon by making hazelnut coffee mac shells, in attempts to make a mocha mac. Well, let's just say attempt no. 7 for me was a hideous disaster! The cookies cracked like no tomorrow and they were completely hollow. Okay, we gave up and didn't even bother with the filling.

Fast forward to Saturday morning when the snow came down in snowballs. Being dumped on = nice when you're indoors AND on a high floor corner unit with an unblocked view of everything. Including the lack of a snow removal truck in the plaza downstairs LOL. While the sun was shining, snow was falling, Mei and I baked some more.

At batch no. 8, I believe we did it!!! Perfect shells, perfect buttercream, perfect people to eat them (Steph and Adrienne, of course. I unloaded 24 of the 30 that we made onto them, keke).

Look how uniform they look :D

Fresh out of the oven! Look at them feet!

Filled with vanilla custard buttercream

Aren't they puurdy?

If I recall correctly, these were my previous attempts:

1. Green tea - 1st time, they were kind of lopsided but semi presentable. No filling. blah.
2. Green tea - failed; flat and flat. Hideous. Epic fail.
   
3. Green tea - again... but got 6 presentable ones. Presentable, which means still not good enough. Filled with red bean paste.
   
4. Sesame with lemon buttercream - Made with 可可 and 細 V. The shells were more presentable, with well formed feet, but they all stuck to the baking sheet! Of the ones we salvaged, we managed to make a few presentable ones.
5. Raspberry ganache - succeeded with the ganache but didn't have shells to go with it since they FAILED! Too humid, shells destroyed at slightest touch.
6. Earl Grey - Made with Stephanie and Adrienne with Meishan supervising. Shells stuck (but feet were nice) and lemon buttercream was a mess. It flew everywhere, including my hair...
7. Hazelnut mocha - another epic fail. They all cracked, had lopsided feet and burst into hideous looking beasts. Middle was completely hollow.
8. Sesame with vanilla custard buttercream - SUCCESS! Finally!