big dirt garden

Well, after carefully studying the new Les Peits Macarons cookbook, I did it. I created beautiful, shiny, and delicious Vanilla Bean and Passion Fruit macarons. The key to success was finding a better recipe.

I decided that I would use the metric measurements provided in the recipe to be super exact. I would leave nothing to chance. These macarons needed to work! However, my analog scale, which easily displays kilogram increments, was not so easy to use for measuring grams.

Using Convertbot and some rudimentary division, this round of mise en place took a bit longer. Is 165 grams, .165 kilograms? Having to count every little hash mark on the scale between .1 and .2 kilograms sucked. .12, .14, .16, .18, wait, take some out. No, add some back in. If I’m honest, I shouldn’t be allowed to do math when I’m in the kitchen. Or anywhere else for that matter.

It was my understanding that there would be no math.
–Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford, Saturday Night Live

But my patience paid off and now I don’t have to go back to Paris. Well, at least not to get some French Macarons.

Coming Soon… I’m thinking Passion Fruit shells with Coconut Caramel Filling.

Yes, I’m still in France. Well, in my kitchen at least. In keeping with the French theme, macarons surfaced to the top of the recipe pile. I’m not referring to the sweet, shredded coconut kind, although those macaroons are very good. No, these French treats are pillowy almond sandwich cookies that typically house a gooey center of fruit or chocolate filling. I’m not sure where I first tasted a macaron, but I am sure it wasn’t in France.

Now the reason I’ve never tried to make these is that the sandwich cookie part is very delicate. Look at them wrong and they might disintegrate. And the meringue part didn’t seem too cooperative either. But since I recently conquered making homemade marshmallow, I figured I could handle this.

I found a few recipes that were simple enough. A recipe for Passion Fruit Macarons came out on top. Bright orange and tantalizing, I was trying to recreate a memory of a milk chocolate and passion fruit macaron I ate at Pierre Herme in Paris. Over a year after eating an entire box of macarons in one sitting, the passion fruit one still stands out. ‘An entire box?’ you ask. Mais oui! They were going to disintegrate. Haven’t you been reading?

I headed to the store and immediately hit a stumbling block. I could not find the passion fruit puree. “It’s out of stock.”, I was told. My remaining puree choices were raspberry and prickly pear. I went with prickly pear. I’ll make Texas macarons! I headed home and continued undaunted.

Combining the cookie ingredients was easy enough. Even making the sugar syrup wasn’t too bad. Just a word of warning though, meringue is super sticky. You could patch drywall with this stuff. It whipped up and folded into the almond base just fine. But I got it all over the place. No, the trouble started when I baked the cookies. Halfway in the cookies started cracking like the soil in a 40-year Texas drought.

Even though the recipe called for a 400° oven, clearly that was too hot. But it was too late. I managed to salvage two “good” halves thinking, ‘well, they all taste fine and I’ll have two good ones to photograph’.

But when I attempted assembly I realized I had forgotten a very crucial ingredient in the filling, the heavy cream. The thickener. The glue to the drywall so to speak. So yes, that sealed the fate of my macaron massacre. Or macaron meltdown.

In case you are wondering, macarons should look like perfect sandwich pillows, should be eaten under the Eiffel Tower while the lights twinkle and the sun sets. Not over your kitchen sink as the filling oozes out.

It seems to be France week here at the Big Dirt Garden. Earlier this week we had some big melons with their own festival and now a boozy cake made with wine from its own AOC. Mix those two together and you’d probably make any Frenchman your best friend.

Back in 1999, I brought this Beaumes de Venise cake to a party. It wasn’t well received. No one was exclaiming ‘OMG, this is the best cake ever!’. This could be for two reasons. First, the term OMG didn’t exist yet. Second, by cake standards, this isn’t a very sweet cake. Thus, they were probably caught off guard or too nice to tell me they thought it sucked. I should have worked on my sales pitch. That or I needed to find some friends with more refined palates.

This recipe reminds me of most olive oil cake recipes, which I love, but the results are often disappointing. Frequently I end up with just an oil-sodden flat cake. Yes, olive oil cake should taste like olive oil, except it should be light and citrusy. This recipe delivers both. Assisted by some lemon and orange zests and a cup of sweet Muscat wine, this is olive oil cake, but better.

I didn’t make any modifications to the recipe and it works beautifully as is. Some Bon Appetit readers suggested adding half of the grapes ~15 minutes into the cooking time. I haven’t tried that but could keep the grapes afloat versus having them sink to the bottom.

This time I served it with a grape syrup that I remembered seeing last year in Food and Wine. Funny thing that I am realizing as I type, this recipe is almost exactly like the one above except it doesn’t require the Muscat. So hey, make either one! Food and Wine’s recipe called for using Sangiovese grape juice to make the syrup. However, most people I know don’t have their own winery. So tough shit, you can’t make the syrup.

But seriously, it’s just reduced grape juice. Super easy and brings out all the wonderful grapeyness (not a word, I know). Be careful and don’t let the grape syrup almost bubble over towards the end of the reduction time or you’ll end up with grape paste. Ask me how I know this.

The August issue of Bon Appetit showed a very sexy picture of a beautiful melon soup. I rarely make soup but this one caught my eye, if only so I could practice my photography with the great colors in the dish. But more importantly because even though we were teased last week with some cooler temperaturs, it’s still 100 degrees outside.

The recipe called for a specific type of melon, a Cavaillon or a Charentais. The former is apparently quite a big deal in the world of melons, has its own festival, and must be certified by an official Cavaillon consortium to be sold in France. That must be some melon.

Regrettably, I am not in France so I planned on getting a regular ‘ol cantaloupe or honeydew. I’ve had some bad luck buying melons in the past. They are typically flavorless and never have that sweet, musky taste I hope for. However, with a stroke of luck, the store had some special orange-fleshed honeydews that smelled fantastic and perfumed my car on the drive home.

Most cold soups are usually pureed raw. This one is a bit different and instructs you to cook the melon for a bit to give you a nice combination of a raw and cooked taste. I had to improvise with the recipe as it called for some white soy sauce which I don’t have. I dug around and found some white miso and substituted a little of that for the white soy and it tasted great.