Kate Loves Macarons

Kate and I have always shared a deep love of macarons.  Some people think we're a bit crazy.  But the rose macaron from Ladurée smells and tastes like heaven.  We each have our favorites and while in Paris we visit Ladurée often.  Kelly always knows we've been to Kate's favorites-Ladurée or Zara, because he receives an email from American Express documenting our spending trail.

Kate and Carter at Ladurée in March

Ladurée Macarons

I stumbled on a cooking school up the street from the apartment on rue du Cardinal Lemoine called Le Foodist.  All their classes are in English and it looked like a fun thing to do with Kate when she came for her second visit to Paris.

Classes at Le Foodist

Our friends had taken croissant and macaron classes before and Kate thought it would be fun for us to try a macaron class.  She felt that she was most likely to be able to make macarons at home.
We arrived for our three hour class and joined six other Americans and our teacher, Florence, who was darling.  Each twosome first worked on a macaron filling.  We were assigned chocolate while others prepared vanilla, pistachio and lemon fillings.  Kate did a great job weighing and measuring all the ingredients and warming the chocolate in a double boiler.  Then we chose a color (pink) and began to make the delicate cookies while the centers chilled.  We made an Italian meringue that did not need to be chilled, unlike a French meringue.  Who knew each country had their own meringue recipe!

Kate watching her egg whites

After preparing the egg whites, we stirred them into the rest of the meringue.  The special stirring technique was called "macararoner" or "to macaron."

Kate doing the Macaroner Stirring Technique 

The next step was piping the cookies onto a tray lined with a silpat.  Kate was really good at piping uniformly sized cookies.

Slamming down the tray to remove air bubbles

Florence worked in Thailand for a time and they liked making macaron bears. After the macaron cookies baked, we matched up the halves and Kate piped on the filling.  Then we twisted the two halves together.

Lining up the cookie shells

Florence and Kate

After everyone finished their macarons, we had a chance to sit down and eat them and then took the extras home.  The next day the cookies had a better crunch on the outside like the ones from Ladurée.  Our favorite was the lemon filling.  And we thought our chocolate filling turned out really well.  Kate was good at keeping everything uniform in size.  She's ready to go work for Ladurée!


Arranging the trays with macarons

Four Flavors of Macarons and a Bear



Ready to Eat our Macarons