While I’m estastic about the overwhelming response to the macarons I’ve put up for sale and grateful beyond words to my repeat customers, I have to admit that I’m completely exhausted. I’ve just come off an entire week of doing not much else besides baking and sandwiching macarons.

I don’t know how other bloggers selling their macarons are managing, but for me, making 6 different flavours per day is no mean feat. It’s especially challenging when I have to make various flavours of buttercream, nut pastes, nut praline and chocolate ganache for the fillings, all in a single day. This is made all the more difficult by the fact that I’m not a fast worker in the kitchen.

In order not to end up with less than perfect macarons due to having to churn out too many flavours each day, I’ve had to turn away potential customers, something which I’m loathe to do since I really don’t want to disappoint anyone who’d like to try them.

This is why I’m toying with the idea of a baking schedule. This amounts to offering 4 fixed flavours (e.g. chocolate, rose, opera, green tea on Mondays, apricot, raspberry, black sesame, hazelnut chocolate on Tuesdays etc) for each day of the week from which customers pick the 3 that they fancy. This way, customers get well-made macarons while I get to preserve my sanity.

I think this could be a win-win situation, no? Feel free to let me know what you think and which flavours you think would work well together!

Incidentally, based on the responses I’ve received about how much filling you like in your maccies, all of you like your maccies the same way I like mine - with a huge dollop of filling!

I’ve finally gotten round to assembling the mango mousse cake that I’d planned to make a couple of weeks ago. I think I’ve just managed to catch the tail end of the mango season.

This cake is made up of alternating layers of springy sponge cake and mango mousse, topped with a layer of mango jelly, which I made using fresh mango puree and a dash of lemon juice to prevent the deep orange colour from turning brown.

For the sponge cake, I used a recipe from my mum’s cake recipe collection. The recipe makes a very “spongey” and soft cake. I’ll definitely be using it as a base for all my sponge cake recipes in the future.

For the mousse and jelly, I adapted Jo’s mango mousse / mango mirror recipes listed in Imperial Kitchen (a local food forum), using gelatine leaves instead of gelatine powder and adjusting the amount of whipped cream in the mousse. It was my first time using gelatine leaves and I got a little worried when the jelly showed no sign of thickening after I’d added the gelatine. In my overzealousness, I think I may have added one leaf too many, resulting in a jelly layer that was a little less sweet than I’d have liked.

Still, I loved the overall look, texture, taste and aroma of this cake. I especially liked the fact that the cake is entirely covered with mousse, without any unsightly layering on the sides. Thanks Jo for sharing your recipes!

This is the new and improved black sesame macarons with black sesame paste filling. I’ve swapped the white sesame seeds for black ones in the filling because of its slightly bitter aftertaste. I’d also thrown some decorative seeds on some of the shells before baking as an experiment. I’d put the seeds on only after baking in my previous attempt as I was worried that they’d burn in the oven.

I loved the fragrantly nutty flavour of this macaron. It’s now my second most favourite flavour after the dark chocolate ones.

These were some extras from a batch I’d baked for an order. Since I’m completely addicted to these little confections, it’s quite obvious where these maccies ended up and no wonder that my waistline is expanding these days!

Although I really like chiffon cakes, I’d always been told that it was really difficult to get the right texture. After seeing HL’s beautifully fluffy chiffon cake, I couldn’t help but be inspired to give this pale green cake a shot myself. My mum had recently loaned me her precious collection of cake recipes, complete with neat handwritten notes and instructions on each page. I flipped through the thick binder, hoping that there’d be one for pandan chiffon cake.

As luck would have it, I found not one, but four different recipes and selected the one with the most notes penciled on it. After all, I’d never made a pandan chiffon cake before and would need all the extra help I could get.

My mum’s recipe called for thick coconut milk and pandan “juice”. Although I could probably have used commercially packed coconut milk and pandan essence, I opted to use fresh ingredients instead. This meant extracting coconut milk from freshly grated coconut and extracting the deep green liquid from fresh pandan leaves. Having done neither of these two things before, I was glad that everything went without a glitch. I suspect hanging around the kitchen as a child and watching my mum perform these tasks umpteen times played a big part in my own “success” here.

Other than being a little surprised that the huge cake slid out of the pan so smoothly (albeit without most of its brown “skin”), I was delighted with my first attempt. The cake was pillowy soft, fluffy and wonderfully fragrant. I would love to bake this cake again sometime soon - if only it didn’t contain sinfully rich coconut milk and such a large number of eggs.

With so many different fruits being in season all at the same time (strawberries, mangoes, durian, lychees, cherries), I was spoilt for choice at the market last weekend. I’m a little late in catching the mango season, but there were still some beautifully ripe mangoes on sale. I had grand plans to make a large mango mousse cake, but got sidetracked by macarons.

I opted for these 4″ miniature desserts instead - made with fresh mangoes, mango mousse, mango jelly, thin layers of sponge cake, some rhubard compote (which I’d made a couple of days ago with vanilla sugar) and brandy-soaked cherries. I’d also picked up a punnet of strawberries and a bag of cherries at the market and threw one of each on as decoration. On hindsight, I think they would have looked better without them.

I had not intended for these desserts to look like something out of a circus - probably due to the alternating stripes of deep orange mango and light yellow mousse. But I guess they’re kind of cute that way.

Yesterday I had an epiphany about macarons. Ok, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but in my previous post, I wrote that I’d been wondering why 90% of macaron photos I’d seen had filling that could hardly be seen from the outside and I think I may have stumbled upon the reason.

I may be entirely wrong, but it could be because these macaron shells are too soft on the bottom and either collapse under the weight of the filling when the filling is piped on or when they are sandwiched with another shell. This means that even if there’s a load of filling inside, it may not be visible from the outside. Of course, this probably doesn’t apply to ALL macarons with “camera-shy” filling. Some could really just be filled with a small amount of cream/paste.

I experienced this “phenomenon” today with my experimental green tea and mango macaron shells. I’d tweaked my usual recipe a little and the new ratio of dry to wet ingredients didn’t quite work out the way I’d hoped. I prefer my macarons a little firmer on the bottom and not quite so delicate that they collapse when sandwiched or turn soft less than 5 minutes out of the fridge.

But enough about my moment of revelation. This post is really about these new macaron flavours:

Mango Shells with Mango Mousse: The shells had a healthy amount of fruity flavour. The filling was light and ethereal compared to regular buttercream or paste filling. However, I’ve concluded that mousse is too soft a filling for macarons, even though my family liked the combination. The macaron would also have to be consumed within a few hours of being sandwiched, since mousse tends to give off moisture. I think I’ll stick with buttercream blended with mango puree in the future.

Verdict: Mango macarons will be on the menu, but with a further adjustment to the shell recipe and a change in filling.

Green Tea Shells with Chestnut Puree Buttercream Blend: I’d always been hesitant about making green tea macarons, mainly because I’m not a green tea fan. The “herbal” and “earthy” taste of green tea works as a drink for me, but not as a flavouring in cakes or cookies. For these macarons, I used matcha powder, instead of sencha powder. In fact, while I was searching the supermarket shelves for matcha powder, I came across several brands of sencha powder which listed sugar as an ingredient! Apparently, not all powdered green tea are created equal and techically speaking, not all green tea macarons are matcha macarons unless they really contain matcha. But I’m no green tea expert and I digress.

Verdict: The green tea macaron was actually surprisingly good and I really liked the chestnut puree buttercream blend, which helped to cut out some of the green tea’s herbal taste. I’ll definitely make this available, once I get the recipe for the shells right.

Black Sesame Shells with White Sesame Paste: These macarons were my favourite flavour of the day. The colour of the shells were wonderful - grey with flecks of black. They reminded me of smooth granite pebbles. The taste was also deliciously nutty and fragrant.

Verdict: A definite keeper, but I’ll be switching to black sesame for the filling. I found that the white sesame paste sometimes left a slightly bitter aftertaste.