Today I delivered my last macaron order for the next 4 weeks or so. Thank you all for your very generous support! While I do have a lot of fun baking and sandwiching macarons, sometimes it does get a tad stressful, especially when there are back-to-back orders on consecutive days. My apartment is also in need of some tidying up - a chore that I’ve barely found time for in the last month. This is why I’m taking a short break from taking macaron orders.

I’ll continue baking during the break, of course. In fact, I still have a couple of cake and muffin orders for August. Just no macarons for sale for the next month or so. I intend to use this time to try out new cake decorating techniques (specifically, royal icing and sugar gum paste) and maybe dream up new macaron flavours.

I couldn’t have found a better way to end my macaron baking frenzy this week than with a special request for Ispahans. I don’t usually make them for sale, but I really couldn’t say no to a really nice customer who put in a request for macarons as well an Ispahan macaron as a wedding gift for a friend who loves “anything Ispahan”. This time, I even made tiny sugar droplets for the rose petals. Sadly, these don’t hold up too well in our humid climate.

Inspired by the Ispahan order, I decided to make a few more Ispahans yesterday and made another trip to the supermarket. There, I found Indonesian raspberries on the shelves! I had no idea that it was possible to cultivate raspberries in Indonesia’s tropical climate.

I also found some time this weekend to experiment with new colour combinations. I liked the combination so much that the white shells and pink filling colour combination will be the new look for raspberry macarons from now on, instead of the old pink on pink.

I’ll still be baking, so do stay tuned, especially if you’re hoping to read about something other than macarons here!

I’m on some sort of “breakfast food” roll at the moment. These were made using my favourite blueberry muffin recipe. In an attempt to make a more healthful version, I tried these with wholemeal flour once, but ended up with really dense muffins. So this time, I stuck to the original tried-and-tested version.

I like these muffins best fresh out of the oven because of their crusty tops and moist insides. But the best thing about them is that they are still fluffy and moist after 3 days, even if stored in a not-so-air-tight container - that is if they make it to the 3 day mark.

Today is the first free day I’ve had in a long while to try something new. I’d bought some Israeli white peaches a week ago, but found them to be sadly lacking in flavour. I decided to poach them first before they went bad and consider what to do with them later since I was short on time last week.

Having spent way too much time in the kitchen the last few weeks, I couldn’t bring myself to embark on another time-consuming project and decided to make danishes with the poached peaches and store bought puff pastry.

The puff pastry looked pretty enough, but was slightly undercooked on the bottom, even though I’d baked it longer than the duration recommended on the packaging. Still, the peaches were tender and full of cinnamon flavour. I think I’ll try them with some Dreyer’s vanilla ice cream tomorrow!

Poached Peaches

Ingredients
2 1/2 cups water
1 cup sugar
2 cinnamon sticks (use 1 stick if you prefer a milder cinnamon flavour)
5 cloves
5 pepper corns

Fresh peaches, halved and pitted (there is no need to peel the peaches)

Directions
1. Place the water, sugar, cinnamon sticks, cloves and pepper corns in a large sauce pan. Make sure that the pan is large enough so that all the peach halves can be immersed in the sugar syrup.
2. Bring the sugar syrup to boil. Reduce the heat and bring to a gentle simmer.
3. Poach the peaches in the simmering sugar syrup for approximately 10 - 15 minutes, until the peaches are tender and translucent.
4. Remove the peaches from the sauce pan with a slotted spoon.
5. Remove the skin from the poached peaches. The skins should slide off very easily.