Winter Macaron

I had some leftover caramel filling and royal icing that I had to use up before I go home. So, I made some salted caramel macarons decorated with royal icing. What I did was add some sea salt to the caramel, hence the salted caramel, colored the macaron batter blue (it's winter right?) and piped snowflakes on the mac shells with royal icing. Done! The caramel filling was too runny, but it was still delicious regardless. Personally, I think the salt cut the sweetness of the caramel and mac shells, but some of my friends thought that the combination of salt and caramel was weird. Maybe they are just not used to sweet and salty sweets. Anw, here are the pics :)

Cookie Time!

Usually, I don't like baking cookies because it's very troublesome. But since it's almost Christmas, it's time for cookie swap! Not that I have anyone to swap my cookies with. I'm just in the mood for baking Christmas-related cookies :) Okay, my first cookie was the linzer cookie in my previous post. I used a recipe from Martha Stewart (here), but I substituted almond meal for hazelnut meal. My second cookie was candy cane cookie sticks, also from Martha Stewart (here). I mixed some matcha powder into half of the batch so I got two different flavors out of one batch. The edges of some of my cookies were browner than others', maybe because my oven temperature was not even throughout. Also, rolling the baked cookies into sticks were challenging because I probably spread the batter too thick.

My third cookie was "gingerbread" man. Well, it wasn't really gingerbread. It was actually chocolate orange cookie since my friends and I don't like the taste of gingerbread. Again, I used a basic sugar cookie recipe from Martha Stewart (here) and added 4 tablespoons of Dutch-processed cocoa powder and 1 teaspoon of natural orange extract to the dough. Then, I rolled and baked the cookie cutouts as directed. For the decoration, I used a royal icing recipe from the website (here) and I only needed about half batch to decorate one batch of cookies.

 

Alright, I hope you enjoy the pictures and can spend some time to bake your own Christmas cookies :) Happy holiday everyone!

It's been a while..

Ahhhhh, it's been  a loooong while since my last post. It's getting near to the end of the year. Can't believe it's already December! I'm finally almost done with my experiments and now I only need to somehow compile all those stuffs that I've done in these past two years into a thesis. Oh well.. at least the standing-in-the-lab-for-8-hours-everyday part was done :) I'm sooo looking forward to winter break, which is in 2 weeks, yeayy!! Anyway, I have been busy and anti-social this past month but that does not mean I didn't spare some time to bake ^^ Here are some pictures of my creations lately: caramel mocha latte macarons, strawberry shortcake 1, strawberry shortcake 2,assorted sushi, cheese pizza, linzer cookies, black sesame macarons. Sorry I haven't been able to post any recipes, but if you are interested in any particular one, just leave a comment or message me. Enjoy :)