Minion Macaron with Mango cream

  French Macaron is any Baker's desire.  They are one such bakes, which needs highest precision.  You need to tame these each and every step, yes almost like handling your toddlers :D  For those, who are new to this term, French Macaron is an meringue-based confection which has an usual filling of ganache, buttercream or any fruit jam.  They differ from Macaroons, since they include almond flour and icing sugar for their crispy shell with an feet.

With Mango season around, I made Mango buttercream as an filling, and played around gel colours and edible marker pens with Macarons to get this Minion theme done.  The base recipe is from Pooja Dhingra's The Big Book of Treats.  Please make sure that you age egg whites for 4-5 days for this recipe.  And yes, all ingredients should be brought to room temperature before use.  

Wow, look at these Minion cuties - if you have any Minion fans back at home, you should definitely give this an try.  And yes, considering complexity of this recipe, make sure you follow each and every step.  

The following recipe yields 18 pairs of Macaron.

Opera cake - Baking partners challenge

    This month's Baking partner challenge was suggested by Savitha,  Opera cake is an famous french pastry where almond flavoured sponge is filled with  coffee buttercream and chocolate ganache with an liberal soaking of coffee syrup.  The final layer is glossed with tempered chocolate and is refrigerated overnight for the coffee flavour to infuse.

The first time, I tried almond sponge, it completely broke, and yes, sadly landed in garbage.  After watching an lot of youtube vidoes,   I gave them another shot.  Yayy... my sponge came out right!  I, divided the recipe by one third as I had an small oven, with baking tray supporting 9 inch by 10.5 inch.  This cake requires an lot of labour, so prepared sponge by day one.  Day two,  morning, prepared syrup, ganache and buttercream.  Assembled by evening and refrigerated overnight, this cake was ready for consumption by third day.

One bite into this pastry, was fabulous with an strong hint of coffee and some chocolate.  Initially, I was  worried when both sponge recipe and buttercream recipe demanded eggs.  But, this pastry had no eggy smell at all.  They were soft and delecious, like Bakery bought ones.  I never though that I could make them this delecious, thanks to Savitha and Swathi Iyer for bringing out such an challenging recipe.