Chocolate Macarons

Hello all,
Some weeks ago I made chocolate macarons, after not having baked macarons for over two years. I was worried that I had lost my touch, but alas it was fine!

That proves that this recipe is an easy one, and that really, you have to be really unlucky to fail with it. The macarons may not have been perfect (I think I would've needed another minute of beating the batter), but they were very tasty. That's really all anyone can ask for!

Chocolate macarons

INGREDIENTS

• 100 g almond powder
• 3 egg whites (about 100-110 g)
• 4 tablespoons sugar
• 185 g powdered sugar
• 15 g cocoa powder
  

DIRECTIONS

I like to prepare my egg whites by leaving them in room temperature for a day before I start baking. It yields better macarons in my opinion.
 
Preheat the oven to 150°C.
Sift the almond powder and throw away the large pieces.
Mix the almond powder with the powdered sugar and the cocoa and sift again.

In another bowl whisk the room tempered egg whites until it starts to foam. Then gradually add the tablespoons of sugar. Whisk the egg whites until thick and shiny. You should be able to hold the bowl upside down without anything pouring out.

Add the almond-powdered sugar-cocoa mix to the eggs and mix. This is where it can get a bit tricky. Obviously the almond-mix should get completely incorporated within the egg whites, however you usually need to mix it a bit more. I usually pick up a bit of the batter with a spatula and if it falls down in a ribbon like shape it is ready and should not be mixed anymore. Mix it too much and you get flat macarons.

Pour the batter into a piping bag with a round tip and pipe the batter onto baking trays prepared with baking sheets. Now it is important to let the piped to-be macarons rest on the baking trays in room temperature for about an hour. I know you're eager to see how they turn out, but the resting of the macarons is super important, because the surface dries a bit and that makes them not loose their shape when they are baked, and it enables the feet to come out when baked (if the anatomy of a macaron is a mystery to you, I highly recommend googling it, but below a photo follows to explain some things).

After the macarons have rested for about an hour in room temperature, bake them at 150°C for about 14 minutes.

Let the macaron shells cool completely before you fill them with ganache. For my ganache recipe click here.

I also painted my macaron shells with a bit of edible gold, just so that they would look a wee bit more luxurious.

And that, my friends, is really all there is to it!
I hope you enjoy this recipe.

Much love,
Mona

Match made in heaven

Hello all,
Hope you're doing great!

I want to share with you a baking "experiment" if you will. It's not really novel in any way, but for me it was quite exciting because it was the first time I made this dough.

I baked éclairs!

Éclairs are these delicious little pastry made with choux dough, or pâte à choux, which is a dough that you cook. Yeah, you heard me. You cook the dough, and instead of a raising agent, the steam incorporated into the dough helps it poof up!

I've only ever tried éclairs once when I was in London, and bought a chocolate éclair from Ladurée. It was delicious, but I don't feel like it prepared me for the adventure of baking my own.

I decided to take the vanilla route myself, but then added chocolate ganache on top as a glaze. Yummy and a match made in heaven in my opinion - but apparently not something you'd do classically as a pâtissière, I was informed by a French friend. I have started rebelling lately after my quiet and calm adolescent years, so I'll put it down to that.

I've split up the recipe into two parts. One for the actual pastry dough, and one for the vanilla pastry cream that goes into it. For the chocolate ganache that goes on top click here.

Chocolate and Vanilla Éclairs

Recipe adapted from Joy of Baking.

Choux Pastry

INGREDIENTS

• 65 grams flour
• 1/2 teaspoon granulated white sugar
• 55 grams butter, cut into pieces
• 120 ml water
• 2 eggs

DIRECTIONS

Preheat your oven to 200°C.

Whisk the flour and sugar together. Bring the water and butter to a boil in a saucepan. Remove from heat and the add in the flour+sugar mix. Return to heat and keep mixing until the dough comes away from the sides of the saucepan and forms a ball. Pour the dough into a mixing bowl and beat for about one minutes to let some of the steam rise away. Once the dough has cooled a little (it's still warm to the touch) add the eggs. Beat until the dough becomes a smooth, thick paste. Pour the dough into a piping bag and pipe oblongs, about 2 cm wide, and however long you want them to be. I made small ones of about 8 cm. Bake for 15 minutes, and then reduce the heat to 180°C and bake for another 25 minutes.

Pastry Cream

INGREDIENTS

• 300 ml milk
• One vanilla pod
• 3 egg yolks
• 50 grams granulated white sugar
• 20 grams flour
• 15 grams cornstarch

DIRECTIONS

Scrape out the seeds in the vanilla pod and add that as well as the actual pod to a saucepan containing the milk. Bring the milk just to a boil.

Mix the sugar and egg yolks together. Mix the flour and cornstarch together and then add the egg mixture to it.

Remove the milk from heat (remove the vanilla pod) and add to the egg mixture whisking constantly. Then pour everything back into a saucepan and cook until boiling, whisking all the while. As it comes to a boil, let it continue for about a minute as the cream thickens up. Pour the cream in a clean bowl and cover the surface with plastic film. Let cool to room temperature and then refrigerate.

Assembly

Before filling the oblongs with pastry cream, dip the prettier side of the oblong in chocolate ganache. Let it dry for a couple of minutes and then you can either cut each oblong into two halves and add pastry cream in the middle. I used a piping bag and filled it with the pastry cream and then stuck the tip into the uncut oblong and pressed the pastry cream into it. It's a bit trickier, but it looks neater. I also added some 23 karat edible gold leaves as decoration to make it even fancier. I got my gold from the Etsy shop Layer Cake Shop (here).

Hope you all have a lovely day!

Much love,

Twenty thousand!

Hello you lovely people!
Happy Friday! I am so happy it's Friday, I am going to sleeeeeep this weekend. What are you doing this weekend?

On to some great news (which you might have guessed by the title of this post), this blog reached 20,000 page views yesterday!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who reads this blog. Without you this would not have been as much fun, so thank you for reading, commenting and talking to me! You are all golden!

Now I know there's been a lot of cake on the blog recently, but naturally 20,000 page views called for a celebration of some kind. And if you know me you know that celebration means cake.

I made these vanilla cupcakes based on a recipe by Manuela Kjeilen of passionforbaking.com and then topped them with my favourite frosting (that you can find here).

These vanilla cupcakes are super nice and soft, very spongy and moist, and it's probably because of the heavy cream used in them. Usually you would use milk in a recipe like this, but Manuela's brilliant idea of adding heavy cream really paid off.

Another thing I want to quickly mention before sharing the recipe are these cupcake liners. They are from Dr Oetker and the amazing thing about them - They're edible!

Yeah, I kid you not, you can eat the cupcake liners! They're made of rice, corn and potato, and taste almost like nothing (a friend said it tasted like communion bread). And you don't have to peel it off you can just bite straight through your cupcake now! How amazing is that!

If you're in Sweden, you can find more info about them here. I'm sure other countries in Europe also have these cupcake liners by Dr Oetker. Have any of my American readers ever seen these? Or something similar?

I was really very fascinated by them, and they are such a nice pale pink colour. The only difference in baking is that you have to increase the baking time a couple of minutes. And then you have an entirely edible cupcake - liner and all.

Vanilla Cupcake

Recipe adapted from Manuela Kjeilen's baking show Baka med Manuela, episode 2


INGREDIENTS

• 200 grams butter
• 325 grams sugar
• 4 eggs
• 400 grams flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 5 decilitre heavy cream
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 175°C.

Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time.

Sift the flour and the baking powder in a bowl, and then add some of it to the egg mixture, alternating with the heavy cream. Begin and end with the flour. Add the vanilla.

Pour batter into cupcake liners placed in a cupcake tray.

Bake for about 20-25 minutes, a skewer inserted into the cupcake should come out clean.

Let cool completely before piping on the frosting and adding sprinkles.

For my favourite chocolate frosting, click here.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend!

Much love,

A Quarter of a Century

It's my 25th Birthday today!!
Yaaay!

After I turned 20 I didn't really want to age anymore. I felt like I didn't really need to get any older to do the things I wanted to (voting), and I felt like the older I would get the less opportunities I would have.

In the last year however I've managed to change my mind. I no longer feel like getting older is bad, and I've learned to embrace my "old soul". So today I couldn't be happier about the fact that it is my birthday. After all it does mean that I get cake. My family has gotten me a princess cake from the best pastry shop in town. A princess cake is a traditional Swedish layer cake filled with pastry cream and topped with delicious marzipan. It is easily the best cake ever!

Because it is my 25th I felt like I needed to go big, so I also made a cake. A chocolate layer cake filled and topped with caramel ganache frosting, and decorated with gorgeous sprinkles. These sprinkles are from Sweetapolita's sprinkle etsy shop (here), and I could not be happier with them. In fact, I bought a whole lot of sprinkles from Sweetapolita, basically emptying my wallet. But it was worth it! These are the prettiest sprinkles I've ever seen. And they did make the cake look amazing!

The cake itself is adapted from the incredible and super talented Manuela Kjeilen's blog Passion for Baking. Her instagram is also one of my favourites to drool over, she's at @passionforbaking. I changed a couple of things about her recipe, I decreased the amount of sugar in the cake, and decreased the amount of butter in the frosting. I also added the cocoa powder with the flour and sifted it, instead of mixing it with the coffee and sour cream. The cake is delicious and wonderfully rich and heavy. It is perfectly chocolatey! You can find Manuela's original recipe here.

Chocolate Caramel Ganache Cake

Recipe adapted from Manuela Kjeilen's blog Passion for Baking

Chocolate sponges

INGREDIENTS

• 250 ml coffee
• 140 ml sour cream
• 335 g flour
• 85 g cocoa powder
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 285 g butter (salted)
• 300 g sugar
• 200 g dark brown sugar
• 4 eggs
• 3 teaspoons vanilla sugar

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 160°C.
Line three 20 cm round baking pans with baking parchment.
Make the coffee, let cool and mix it with the sour cream. Set aside.

Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and baking soda in a bowl. Set aside.

Beat the butter until pale and fluffy, add the sugar and continue beating, until fluffy.
Gradually add the eggs, one by one, beating until it is all well combined. Add the vanilla.

Gradually add the flour mixture and then the coffee mixture, alternating between the two, beginning and ending with the flour mixture.

Divide the batter into the three pans and bake for 30-35 minutes.


Caramel Ganache Frosting

INGREDIENTS

• 200 g sugar
• 65 ml water
• 250 ml heavy cream (whipping cream)
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla sugar
• 450 g dark chocolate, chopped
• 400 g butter, room temperature

DIRECTIONS

Add the sugar and water to a saucepan and place on medium heat until sugar has dissolved. Increase to high heat and bring to a boil, until sugar syrup turns golden brown, do not stir at all at this point. Take the saucepan off the heat and add the heavy cream. Be careful as it will bubble up, and it is very hot. Pour in the vanilla and set back on heat. Let it boil for another minute or two.

Pour the caramel over the chopped dark chocolate. Blend it until smooth. Then gradually add the butter, letting it melt in the hot ganache. Place in fridge for about 30 minutes to 1 hour, when all the butter is added.

Remove from fridge (the frosting will have set at this point) and beat until frosting is smooth and creamy.

Spread some of the frosting onto one of the cakes, place another on top and do the same before adding the last cake. Spread the rest of the frosting on top of and around the cake.

Add some sprinkles and you're done!

This is how happy cake make me!
I just love to bake and eat cake. I find it fun to bake and delicious to eat. I wish I could have shared cake with all of you, but instead I'm going to wish you all the best of days! I hope you guys indulge in something yummy today and celebrate my Birthday with me!

I hope you all have a beautiful day!

Much love,