French baguettes

I have read many articles that speak of the impossibility of replicating authentic French bread in America, let alone in a home kitchen, but I was feeling daring and I went ahead and tried it!  :) I used this recipe from my favorite cooking site, www.allrecipes.com and it had several positive reviews from people who'd traveled to or lived in France. 

Since I was making the baguettes for my Petite Parisienne party, I wanted them too to be miniature so my baguettes more closely resembled breadsticks.  I must say that the most challenging part for me was getting the dough to rise enough because it is supposed to rise somewhere very warm (80-85 degrees) and I baked on a cold winter day. My solution (took me a failed attempt to figure it out) was to use my space heater in our laundry room (the smallest, unused space in our home). It seemed to yield better results.

Here is a shot of the finished product:

Macarons

Macarons (mah-kah-ROH) are a great little French treat.  For all of you trying to be both dairy and gluten-free, this is perfect for you.  They are made of almond flour, eggs and powdered sugar. The ganache, however, does have heavy cream in it. Tartelette is a well-renowned French pastry chef who lives and works here in the US.  Click here to check out a blog post about learning how to make Macarons with Tartelette.

I set out to make these little guys about a month ago and the technique was too tricky for this amateur!  However, I finally found this recipe which claims to be fool proof and I tried again.

I made French chocolate macarons with chocolate ganache filling for the first batch (doubled the recipe). Upon achieving success, I just had to make another flavor (and use up some of the leftover chocolate ganache) so I made Martha Stewart's recipe  here  for French vanilla macarons (used food coloring to make them pink) and then added high quality raspberry preserves to the ganache to get a raspberry-chocolate ganache filling.  I sampled the final result and they were très bien!

Overall assessment: Very simple to make once you get the technique down. You truly do have to use the extra large plain pastry tip to get the right shape.  Also, you don't need to let them sit out for a while after piping them onto parchment paper.  Simply wrap the cookie sheets onto the countertop a few times and you will get the same effect.  Oh yeah, you do need to use egg whites at room temperature.

If at first you don't succeed, dust yourself off and try again?

The task: Mini sugar pastry crusts.
The challenge: Getting them to retain their shape while cooking, as they are extremely delicate.

Well, it would seem that Julia Child only gives recipes for a regular sized fruit tart, which also means a regular pastry crust.  In her recipe, she recommends either placing a piece of buttered foil with uncooked beans or another pie tin over the top of the pie tin in order to set the shape of the shell. I thought that since I have two muffin pans that bake 12 muffis each I could simply use one to cook the crusts in ans the other to lightly set on the top.  This idea may have even worked had I not made my crusts too think to where the bottoms were thick and bubbly and my overlay pan didn't flatten them enough. Also, it seems that I didn't grease the overlay pan enough because when I went to remove it, the entire pastry shells came with.

Much to my dismay, only 2 of the 10 survived in tact, and even they look a little funky if you look at the bottoms, which are about 1/3 inch think and warped looking.

Here's a picture of the best ones:

And here are the rest of them:

So, what does that mean for my poor American guests who truly need to experience the amazing goodness of une tarte française?  It means I had better dust the flour off and try again.  This time I will try a different strategy and double the recipe so that I can make 20-24 in one batch. Wish me luck as I am losing my energy to tackle such a feat.