Chocolate Dipped "Strawberry Girl" Macs

This months mactweets challenge: Bake a mac inspired by a favorite summer childhood memory.

When I was younger I loved eating strawberries. They were my most favorite treat.

I loved them so much that quickly I became Strawberry Girl.

All throughout my childhood I collected all things strawberry. Cute outfits with strawberries on them. Little strawberry figurines. And many sweet strawberry tea sets. I think I remember having 10 different ones or something like that and I was so proud of them.

I ate strawberries all the time. Then one day something glorious happened. I was introduced to chocolate dipped strawberries. I had no idea a strawberry could even get any better- but dipped in chocolate! what a treat!

I remember being so excited dipping strawberries with mom. We would buy a Symphony chocolate bar, which I thought was so fancy and dip them and I could eat a bunch.

It was perfect.

So this months macs are appropriately chocolate dipped strawberry flavor. I even found one of my favorite strawberry tea sets to display them on.


They are filled with fresh strawberry Italian meringue buttercream.


And drizzled with delicious Callebaut milk chocolate.


I've been dreaming about macarons for months! These delicate little treats are not easy to come by and expensive when you do (but worth it!) so it is advantageous for macaron lovers to learn the art!

And learning I am! It took me a few trys to get into the mac-making groove. After my little hiatus my first batch of macarons came out looking like this:


bleh. We still ate all of them though :)

The results helped me remember a few things to do differently and the next batch came out like this:


Getting consistently uniform size is so hard for me! I really need to work on my piping! For now, I do my best to at least match both sides of each macaron so the cookie itself is uniform!

Amoeba Pizza and Artisan Bread!

Awhile back I had a lesson in artisan bread making. Finally, this week I put it to use!

I've been making a really big effort to be better about making meals every night. And as I've been planning and coming up with a system I thought: how easy dinners would be if we had fresh bread and salad as a fairly staple part of our meals each night.

This bread is a dream. Really, it is so much easier than I ever thought it would be.

So I do think the title: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is really true. I think I just might have to buy the book now- or Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. That one sounds very nice too.

Here is my first humble little loaf:

One thing I was very excited about with this bread dough is that is can also be used for pizza. I love to make homemade pizza but all the rising steps and such make it something that takes a bit of planning.

Well, I rolled out some of this dough one night, threw some toppings on it and baked it in the oven- and really it was some of the best homemade pizza dough we've had.

Dashing Boy said my pizza looked like an amoeba.
Which sounded so cool that I instantly got images of us having amoeba pizza nights with our children. We're such nerds.

Dainty Passion Fruit Macarons

I had so much fun on my first batch of macarons that I decided I would give it another go. This time, joining on the Mactweets challenge: spring fling, where I was encouraged to let my favorite springtime flowers influence me in the kitchen!

Also influencing me in the making/naming of these cookies was the conversation I had with Dashing Boy a couple of nights before these were made...

Sometimes Dashing Boy talks in his sleep. It doesn't happen very often but when it does it is very entertaining and usually he says a bunch of jibberish and stuff that makes no sense at all.

On this particular night Dashing Boy had already been soundly asleep for over an hour, while I had just gotten to bed. Suddenly, I sneezed.

Dashing Boy sweetly leaned over to me and said,

"It's ok. It's more for sauces. It's not really meant for dainty things."

The remainder of the night and many moments the next day were spent laughing and laughing at such randomness.

And so these macarons are appropriately named "dainty." Because if there is anything meant to be dainty, I believe it would be a macaron.


When I think of spring and all of the colorful, fresh flowers that introduce it I think of happiness and the sun. The arrival of spring makes me feel alive.

Passion fruit- both the taste and the color make me feel happy and alive.

I was thrilled that I was able to find both passion fruit concentrate and passion fruit pulp at the Mexican market.

So first I whipped up a batch of milk chocolate passion fruit ganache- yum! Then I did my best to color the macarons the same vibrant color of delicious passion fruit.

I was pretty happy with how these turned out. But they were still lopsided- need to work on my piping technique! My biggest problem of all though was that on both batches I made half of the macaron tops cracked!


Next time I'm going to double up my baking sheets and see if that helps... Luckily macarons still taste good even when they don't look as dainty and cute!

le French Macarons.

Friday Evening I tried my hand at French macarons. These petite beauties are all the rage right now.

And so after trying one for the first time, reading the ingredients: egg whites, sugar, powdered sugar, and nut flour (I mean, really, how could anything not be delicious with those ingredients! nut flour as a base for anything is always so good), and being completely inspired by other women venturing into this baking art I decided to try it.

So I went to my go-to baking diva Cristie at The Table Runner. I had already studied her latest "mac" blog post, but had just a few questions before I began. I'm so glad I called her because she gave me tips such as:

• Make sure your nut flour is very fine. (I ground my blanched almonds as fine as I could then ground them further once I added the powdered sugar).
• Don't double the batch before you test it out a few times- different ovens vary in how they cook the macs and changes might need to be made in baking time/temperature for your particular oven.
• Macs really do look better with some color and spunk. I was going to omit any coloring but they really do look fun and fancy with some.
• Add a little flavor to the cookie in the middle of beating the eggs (this goes for color as well) I added 1 teaspoon almond extract.
• Pipe the macs on parchment paper with a pattern underneath- this was extremely helpful as my macs would have been a wide assortment of overconfident sizes without the pattern (pull the pattern out before baking).
• Add sprinkles or sanding sugar before baking.
• The macs are done when they pull off easily from the parchment. If they are sticking at all they are not done yet.
• Pipe instead of spread ganache and fillings as macs are pretty delicate.

I used this recipe on Passionate About Baking.

Cristie has even more tips on her blog post. She is in a group called Mac Tweets- a group of dedicated French macaron bakers. They have challenges and stuff and I kind of want to join!

Also very helpful was Bonnie's macaron post on City Home/ Country Home. She has some wonderful pictures of the process.

All in all I'm very happy with the end result of my macs. They were a bit lopsided but they did have some "feet" (the ruffle on the bottom) which made me happy. I filled mine with a milk chocolate ganache.

Dashing Boy ate a bazillion of them and said they were the best. In fact, he almost made himself sick he ate them so fast. I'll definitely be making these again!