I have always loved to cook, and have been pretty good and figuring things out as I go. I also have a slight obsession with Macarons. I knew they were tricky to make, so when I found out that Sur la Table had a Macaron cooking class I was all over it!
Sur la Tab has quite a few cooking classes, however only about 1% of them are gluten free. Macarons are always gluten free so I was really excited!
Apparently some of the courses are not hands on so they have a mini classroom set up in the kitchen.
But tv screens and carefully places mirrors so you can see what is going. I didn't have to worry about that too much because the macaron class was hands on!
Our instructor was Chef Colette, who was fantastic! If you can take the course from her I highly recommend it! She knows her stuff and is really fun to work with.
So we all broke off into groups of 3-4 people and the different groups made different types of macarons. The three flavors were coffee with chocolate ganache, apple with cinnamon butter cream, and pistachio with butter cream. Not a bad selection!
Colette walked us though the correct brands and types of sugars or dye to get and gave us the run down on how to prep all the ingredients.
One think I noticed, was that as long as you use the right ingredients, you should be pretty good. But it is not the type of cooking you can just decide, Hey I'll make some macarons today. Nope, you have to prep!
Look at that delicious fluffy meringue cookie!
What is fun about macarons is that you can use a pastry bag so squirt them out in to the little circles. This was something I was not immediately good at, (to be honest, a lot of the techniques she taught us were pretty tough!) but eventually the circles became more even and they had less tails.
After we had the cookies ready to bake, we took a nice lil break.
Maybe it is excellent customer service, or maybe it is clever marketing, but whatever it is they make you delicious coffee, espresso, cappachino or lattes during the break with a fancy machine. (a machine they sell in the store for a lot of money)
After the break we made the frosting to sandwich between the cookies!
This also was pretty easy, and very helpful! The frosting will be really good on cupcakes or with a spoon out of a tupperware container!
When our cookies were ready we started to fill them up and sandwich them!
My group was pretty speedy so we got to fill some extras as well. (more to secretly snag and stuff into our mouths!)
Filling with the butter cream is the easiest part! It is also the most exciting part, because it means they are done and ready to eat!
I filled as many of the macarons as possible. You might think it could be because I was being a teacher's pet. But I'm no dummy, the more macarons ready to go, the more macarons in our take home baggies!
How pretty are those! They were also delicious!
I had plenty to take home, plus I got a nice discount to the store since I took a class, so I didn't let that go to waste!
I haven't yet made macarons at home, mostly because when I have time to bake, it is too late to do all the prep work. I really need to plan ahead to get everything together.
Let me know what flavors you want me to make and I will get to it! Also, would you like to see a macaron video or blog post?
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