A day off should to be spent considered. And this a dear friend and me did last week. As my friend is as much passionated about baking as I am we decided to to a macaron marathon to compare two different recipes. One was the recipe of Pierre Hermè that I baked two weeks ago and the other one my friend get of the French grandmother of a friend.
Both recipes differs a lot from each other: the Hermé recipe contains more sugar and is made with an italian meringue. This makes the recipe more complicated, but it yields great macarons as well. The grandmothers recipe is very easy to prepare, but we struggeled with runny dough, cracks in the macaron shell and problems with the right baking time. Non of this happend with the Hermé recipe, we baked about 120 macaron shells with that recipe and each of them was perfect! And while the last time I pipe the macarons “free style” this time we used a template we place below the baking paper, so the macarons look now as similar as peas in a pod.
The macarons have a core of lemon curd which is surrounded by a dark pink ganache. The combination of lemon and raspberries is always a dream and the slight tartness of the fruits is the perfect contrast to the sweet shells! A beautiful and delicious treat! Continue reading
For this I have to blame 
Tired, but happy I look back on the last week. Tired because I came back very late Sunday night just to leave again on early monday to morning to a mass spectrometry training in Frankfurt. Luckily there was not as much snow as forecasted and all trains were in time. Thinking on the bread festival in Berlin makes me still smiling, as it was such a good experience. I’m very happy that I met some of my Readers there!
There is one wish still open for the Bread baking course: yeasted cake! And what would be a better idea to 
Our whole flat is filled with apple flavour. In front of the kitchen there is a whole bucket of “Jakob Lebel” Windfall Apples waiting to be processed and in the living room I placed a big bowl with dark red “Pomme de Coeur” (Sternrenette). This is another old heritage apple variety and a joy for the taste buds and nose: flavourful, aromatic, delicious. And it’s dark red colour makes it a joy for our eyes as well. With so many apples in the house baking some apple cakes is a must. And as I got this beautiful tiny tartelett rings as birthday present using them was a must as well. I decided to go for a recipe from Matthias Ludwigs “Törtchen und Torten”.
Cornucopia, the horn of plenty, is a symbol of abundance and nourishment in the classical myths and is often associated with autumn. And when I prepared my little pastries I look on the nuts and apples and that little cornucopia would be the right way to celebrate autumn plenty.