Farewell Macaron Croquembouche..

It's May already, time for what? Graduation, of course! My boyfriend is having his commencement this weekend and I wanted to make something special to celebrate his freedom from his annoying professor =D So, it should be something colorful, fun, and delicious.. Aha!! Macaron croquembouche! I'd been wanting to make this for a looonggg time since I saw a picture of Laduree's mac tower. I didn't want to make a huge one, so I had to scale down the size of the macarons. First step, make some mini macs.

The right one is a regular size macaron and the others are the minis. I filled the mini macs with white chocolate ganache and caramel cream and put them in the freezer to firm up. Then, I covered the styrofoam cone (the base of the croquembouche) with plastic wrap and melted some white chocolate. Ready for assembly!! I applied a little bit of white chocolate on the minis and immediately sticked them on the cone. After the cone was completely covered, I put it in the freezer. The result?

Looked pretty good for a first trial. But something was missing... Hmm... cake at the bottom probably? So, I made a small round orange chocolate cake (vanilla genoise + orange cream cheese buttercream + chocolate ganache) and put my mac tower on top of the cake. Piped "Happy Graduation Rudy" with melted white chocolate, sticked them on the cake, and DONE!!

Last Mac Package of the Semester

Finally, it's the end of the semester and my last mac package of the semester is here!! The flavors are blackberry orange (dark purple shell with orange M), raspberry white chocolate (pink), jasmine tea lychee (teal with pieces of jasmine tea on top), hazelnut praline (brown with hazelnut pieces), and rum dulce de leche (light brown). Out of the five, I love the jasmine tea lychee and rum dulce de leche the most. The problem with them is they need constant refrigeration, because the jasmine one has lychee jelly in it and the dulce de leche one is filled with dulce de leche pastry cream. Anw, pictures are posted below as usual :)

Halsey Tart: The Original Twix

I'm taking a break from baking macarons this weekend, so I tried out a recipe which I had been wanting to try for a long time: Halsey Tart. The description in the recipe book said that it was the original version of Twix (the candy bar). The recipe yields a 9-inch tart, but I wanted to make it more similar to the size of a candy bar so I made small round tarts instead of one big one. Basically, the tart consisted of chocolate short dough, caramel whipped cream, creamy caramel sauce, and chocolate ganache. I sprinkled the tops with a little bit of gold sugar just for decorative purpose. The chocolate short dough was a little bit too bitter for me, but it actually worked quite well with the sweetness of the caramel. Overall, it was good, but still it was not the same as Twix. Next time, I'll probably use regular short dough, instead of chocolate, to make it more similar to Twix.