Ever since I’d seen the beautiful photograph of raspberry napoléon in Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook, I’d always wondered what the contrasting textures would taste like. The only hurdle in my way was the puff pastry.

I’ve always wanted to give puff pastry a go, but never had the courage to do so. I’ve convinced myself that the butter blocks would just melt horribly in the warm weather over here and I’d end up with a thick block of dough with no layers whatsoever.

So, when my parents presented us with store-bought puff pastry they’d carted all the way back from Melbourne (please don’t ask me how they did this without the pastry sheets defrosting on the flight), I knew right away what to do with them.

The resulting dessert was visually pleasing, but I didn’t like the texture of the store-bought pastry. Although the layers were present, I found the pastry a little too dry and flakey. Fortunately, the vanilla flecked pastry cream, which I’d also infused with orange zest, was lovely with the slightly tart raspberries. It looks like I’ll have to try making my own puff pastry!

This was lunch today. Chicken drumsticks marinated overnight in Lee Kum Kee’s chicken marinade and baked in the oven at 180 degrees C for 30 minutes, blanched green vegetables (choi sum or cai xing) and Vietnamese Phó mixed in a sauce consisting of dark soya sauce, sugar and sesame oil.

It was simple but satisfying. If only every meal were this easy to throw together…

I’d bought a 9″ square cake ring and couldn’t wait to put it to use. I was too lazy to bake a cake from scratch, so I put together a dessert that didn’t require baking, but could still fill up a cake ring.

This italian dessert can be put together on a wimp, unless you’re baking the sponge fingers or sponge cake layers instead of using store-bought ladyfinger sponges. All you need is some heavy cream, mascarpone cheese, sugar, Amaretto, expresso and the sponges.

Normally, I would have piled on the mascarpone cream, but my family had complained that the last one I made had too high a cream-to-sponge ratio. This is the waistline-friendlier version with 2/3 the amount of cream. No complaints received this time!

These delightfully pale macarons were inspired by the opéra cake, a cake made popular by the well-known Dalloyau Parisian pâtisserie more than 50 years ago.

The opéra cake, or Clichy cake (named after Louis Clichy who supposedly created this cake), is an elegant mulit-layered cake made up of several thin layers of joconde (an almond sponge cake), a layer or two of coffee buttercream, a layer of chocolate ganache and a topping of chocolate glaze.

Since macarons have at least 2 similar components (almonds, buttercream or chocolate ganache) to the classic opéra, I though it would be an interesting experiment to “port” the combination of flavours in the cake to macarons.

For the shells I experimented with ground hazelnuts, which have a much stronger flavour than almonds. I especially love the contrast of the tiny flecks of dark brown hazelnut skin against the pale creamy colour of the shells. The macarons were then sandwiched with an expresso-flavoured italian meringue buttercream and a chocolate ganache centre.

The resulting macaron was a wonderful combination of flavours and textures - nutty & chewy hazelnut macarons, aromatic & fluffy expresso buttercream and decadently rich dark chocolate ganache. Wildly addictive, even for a non-coffee drinker like me!

[Latest Update: 1 May 2007] Available for Purchase: 1.5″ - 2″ macarons @ S$1.50 each (min purchase of 28 macarons, choice of 3 flavours per order of 28). Please see this post for other flavours or click here. Gift box packaging available @ a nominal cost.

You can now have these delicate and elegant French confections at your next tea party, birthday party, picnic, office event or simply because they are so wonderfully addictive! They also make perfect gifts for your friends or family for that special occasion.

Flavours Available: Chocolate (with dark chocolate ganache), Hazelnut (with hazelnut chocolate buttercream), Lemon, Rose, Raspberry (with a light lemon, rose and framboise buttercream respectively), Opera (with expresso buttercream and a dark chocolate ganache centre), Apricot (with apricot cream, studded with plum apricot bits and a nut praline centre), Pistachio (with pistachio paste and a nut praline centre), Blackforest (with dark chocolate ganache and a cherry centre). Custom flavours available on request.

Chocolate Macarons with Dark Chocolate Ganache:

Hazelnut Macarons with Light Chocolate Hazelnut Buttercream:

Lemon Macarons with Tangy Lemon Buttercream:

Rose Macarons with Delicately Scented Rose Buttercream:

Raspberry Macarons with Fruity Framboise Buttercream:

Available for Purchase: 1.5″ - 2″ Macarons @ S$1.50 each (min purchase of 28 macarons, choice of 3 flavours per order of 28). Elegant gift box packaging available @ a nominal cost.

For details on how to place your order and full listing of available macaron flavours, please click here.

This cake came about only because I wanted to empty my fridge of the following: 1 1/2 pints of disappointingly-bland Californian strawberries, 1/2 bowl of milk chocolate cream waiting to be whipped and 1/3 cup of raspberries, which at S$8.95 a box, were too precious to let go to waste.

With these ingredients in mind, I flipped through my collection of cookbooks for some inspiration and came across a recipe for French Strawberry Cake in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking with Julia. It sounded like a delightfully light cake, which was perfect after a weekend of sinfully rich chocolate desserts.

My only gripe with the recipe was that it called for a genoise sponge cake. I’ve always found genoise sponge cakes tricky to master. One turn too few of the spatula and the flour doesn’t get worked in properly; one turn too many and the batter becomes too fluid and the cake won’t rise. In my opinion, even macaron batter is a little more forgiving than genoise batter.

Despite my misgivings, I forged ahead with the Perfect Genoise recipe from the same book. The first attempt was a none-too-surprising failure; I’d overfolded the batter. I managed to salvage the top 1/3 of the cake, which was still surprisingly light and airy, and discarded the dense bottom 2/3 of the cake. The second cake, on the other hand, turned out perfect.

The result was a creamy yet light cake with 4 layers of genoise, 2 layers of cream and mashed strawberries (soaked overnight in sugar) and 1 thin layer of chocolate whipped cream. I even attempted piping with whipped cream - something I’d done only once before in my entire life.

Will I make this cake again? Most definitely, but perhaps I ought to get more practice with the genoise sponge first.

I’d wanted to try making this impressive looking milk chocolate dessert since I bought Dorie Greenspan’s Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme. Just that I’d never found the time to do so until this weekend.

This multi-component dessert could be completed in a day, if one were an early riser, efficient and planned well-ahead. I chose instead to make the individual components over a couple of evenings before finally assembling them yesterday.

The dessert is made up of 5 components - chocolate sheets, whipped chocolate cream, ganache, hazelnut dacquoise and praline. For the chocolate, I used Valrhona Jivara Lactée 40% milk chocolate. Be forewarned: this chocolate tastes spectacular on its own - I couldn’t resist eating it while chopping them up for the ganache.

Given the terribly warm and humid weather we’ve had here the last couple of days, it was a real challenge to temper the milk chocolate and form the chocolate sheets without making a big chocolatey mess. I eventually solved the problem by working in my living room with the air-conditioning going at full blast.

The other components were simpler to put together. I particularly liked the hazelnut dacquoise with its thin layer of Nutella praline, although the rectangles turned out untidier than I’d have liked. The praline layer started melting as soon as I began cutting the dacquoise.

The end result was a rich and decadent plated dessert that tasted heavenly, but too rich to finish on my own. In hindsight, I should have made the chocolate ganache layers thinner. If you ever attempt making this dessert, I’d recommend making the individual portions a little smaller.

Note: If you live in Singapore and think that this dessert looks somewhat familiar (my rendition is taller and wider), you’re probably right. Bakerzin markets a similar dessert under the name “Sweet Pleasure”, a direct translation of “Plaisir Sucré”.

What you may not know is that the concept for this amazing dessert with its multitude of textures was created in 1993 by Paris’ famed pastry chef Pierre Hermé. Another interesting thing I’ve discovered is that the counters at the Bakerzin outlets showcasing their desserts look remarkably similar to the ones at the Pierre Hermé outlets in Paris!