I Love Macs!

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Hello Sugarpies, how's life? Mine currently, flat, but not too boring, as I always get myself busy and have something to do, imperceptibly days are just passing me by. Everyday I cooked for the whole family, just like a good housewife. No I'm not married yet, but soon I'll become one, so that's why my dad is succeed persuade me to learn and practice to cook. Cooking is easy. The hard part is, decide, what dish you want to cook just with what you have in your fridge. First week is quite easy, you can find almost complete groceries in there, and you can cook anything with that. Second week is getting harder, because the groceries stocks are running out and you need to cook different dishes, or else people will get bored with your cooking.

I tried so hard to find easy but delicious recipes over the internet everyday, which is sucks, because you know I only can browsing through my iWhite and the provider is just acted like shitty! And it’s also difficult to even find simple recipes, especially when there’s a limitation in you. You’re simply run out of the ingredients. My mum only goes to the market once every two weeks, so, twice a month, to buy lots of groceries, but yeah, it depends on the situation of course. But I couldn’t ask her to buy every single little thing that I want to cook. But after all, I love and enjoyed cooking. Oh yeah! I will definitely be a great housewife one day! Come on marry me, my dearie, and I will stuffed your bellies with all delicious foodies. LOL :p

Anyway, enough talking about the main course, now it’s time for desserts. When it comes to desserts, I believe, people can’t really hold their saliva! :D Oh yeah! Who on earth could resist the temptation of desserts? I simply couldn’t, and I bet you trice! Are you on the same boat with me? :D But hold on! It’s not like I am making a creamy, full of chocolates and strawberries cakes or something, just yet. Tee Hee... But I was making macarons! Yay!!

I’ve always wanted to make it for quite some time. It is a pretty, cute and tiny French meringue biscuit that has a crisp shell and delicate on the outside but soft inside. Made with almond meals, egg whites and surely lots of sugar, sugar and sugar! It tastes sweet and yum! The ingredients are simple and easy to find and not too expensive, especially when comparing with the macaron price itself per pieces, or well, maybe the almond meals/flour is a bit hard to find, umm no... impossible to be found in anywhere in my hometown, so you need to buy almonds and grind it with food processor or blender, manually. Don’t freak out! It’s not that hard to grind it. The machines will do and many people in all over the world are also grinding them manually :)

Okay, to make it short, I’ll just stop explaining more about this cutie biscuit to you. You can googling them. Even the ingredients are simple and easy to find, making them is another thing. You can find the recipe and with how-to-make video everywhere, and it looks no sweat in making them, but you are totally wrong! It’s not as easy as it looks. And sure thing is, you do need to sweating in making this little “bastard” :p and in the end, it might not turns out as what you expected.

In my case, I’ve tried 3 times and FAILED! I’ve tried browed around the internet, read so many online tips and tricks from the great patisserie chef, great king and queen of macarons to the common people, which have best luck in them, so that their very first attempt turned out so great with perfect “feet” on it. SIGH. I almost give up. Moreover, my mum wasn’t very supportive after we tried our 2nd batch and it failed. She also stopped buying me almonds, which simply made me can’t do anything else.

You know, sometimes, I have a very strong determination in doing something, which is good in one time and bad on the other time. So every day, I read more and more articles about anything related to macarons, from the true story till its myths, until one night, I slept with my iPhone turned on all night long, tried to load the content of dozen pages till its run out of its juice, on the next morning, while I was dreaming about these Macs!! Can you believe it? I want to be able to make it, a perfect macarons so badly! Seriously. I never that good in making cakes, desserts or anything else, just like my pro mum, but I am eager to learn to beat this Mac! So I begged her to buy me almonds again. I said that I will pay everything, the eggs, the icing sugars, almonds, everything! Because I know, I won’t stop until I get what I want.

And thanked Mum!! I was about to kiss my mum right away when she came home one day with plastic of almonds inside. I jumped, really, then this time, started to bake the almonds first. I did many experiments in making this mac. I tried my 3rd batch, all by myself, without any help from mum. I know it’s gonna failed because it didn’t dry after I sit them for 45 mins. It took more than two hours till it dried, and then I bake them. No sign of “feet” after 5 mins I put them in the oven. Oh, man! Another disaster! But this disaster didn’t stop me!

Here comes my 4th batch. I made them yesterday. The 4th batch was turning out quite well, but I am not satisfied yet. I don’t know what is wrong with it. I made one trays only. Half succeed and showed up with beautiful shells and perfect “feet” inside the oven, but the other half were failed, burnt, cracked and some of them showed up with no “feet” at all. After I removed the macs from the oven, some of them didn’t looks as nice as when there were still in the oven, but still okay. This Tiny biscuits gave me a HUGE headache! Seriously, Duh!

Here are some pics of my 4th batch  I made the original, without adding any colours, and didn’t have any chance to make its filling yet. [UPDATE: I'm not be able to upload any pics here! Blame the provider! I will update this post with more pics later on. I can't deal with this stupid connection and provider anymore. Gotta go now or else they're not going to eat anything for lunch! LOL!!.] My goal is making the macs, not the filling and the filling is really piece of cake. If you are too lazy, you can just stuff them with jam or melted chocolate :)

[UPDATE: Finally, here's the pics of my macarons :) Above: Plain Macarons Shells, Below: With Chocolate Ganache. ]

I read more and more tips and trick again and again, now I know, where did I go wrong and I’m going to do more experiments. I am very stubborn or what, I don’t know. All I know is I’m going to succeed in making them. I know I will, as long as I keep on practicing! So, will you excuse me now? I’m going to make another batch today, with its filling. Gonna filled it with chocolate ganache :) but before that, I’m going to cook for our lunch, first thing first.

Ciao.

I prefer to regard a dessert as I would imagine the perfect woman: subtle, a little bittersweet, not blowsy and extrovert. Delicately made up, not highly rouged. Holding back, not exposing everything and, of course, with a flavor that lasts. ---Graham Kerr

Tea, Jam and Bread

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I'm back. You know, I can't say that today is my bad day, since I didn't experience any "bad" things today. Everything just went good as usual. But, I why today I feel like, good thing doesn't came on the right time, but bad things are almost always came in a wrong time. That is simply why people would called it as a bad day.

What's wrong with today? As a matter of fact, nothing. No things are too "bad" for today-Thanked God, I still can have this gratitude in me- :)

Here's my story. I woke up this morning, a little too late than usual. I know my mum has woke me up before 6 am, but I couldn't get up from my bed, because I couldn't opened my eyes. :( More Precisely, my right eye. It stuck like there's a glue, glueing my eye. I simply couldn't wear my soft lens today. And it's discomfort wearing my old glasses. I rarely use it, because it's too heavy for my eyes and nose to hold it. Imagine, mine is -8.50 for the right eye and -9.00 for left eye. Imagine the thickness of the glass, although it has undergone a process of depletion, it still way too thick and heavy. A depletion process does make it thinner but not making it any lighter, note that.

Back to my glued-eye. I forced to opened my eyes and results of that compulsion are it's hard for me to see things clearly because my eyes are constantly watering, hard to breath because of running nose! SIGH! I don't know how many tissues already wasted today, not because of me having flu or something, but my nose is keep on running! Geez!!

Then, since yesterday, while I am home, I should cook for the whole family. For lunch and dinner. I know, we can just ask the servant to do that, but my dad said that I should learn how to cook, well, I can, but he said that it's better for me to get use to cook start from now on, for my goodness and for my future of course. Now with my eyes condition, can you imagine how hard it would be?

Oh yeah! It's damn hard to cook in my situation. Being in one of the most smoky places in the world with an irritated eyes, yeah, you should try it someday! Now, while I'm writing this, water keeps coming out from both my eyes and nose. Actually, it's so hard for me to face my laptop, but what to say. I have works to do and the deadline is tomorrow. Great. I guess I'll just reduce the brightness and hope everything will be okay. I can't stand it, seriously. *cries* :'(

I also can't stand watching TV so, it will be no more Master Chef Australia for today. Oh, btw, talk about Master Chef Australia 2010, my most favorite is Callum :) Followed by Matthew, Fiona, Skye, Claire, Adam, okay okay I have to stop. I'm out of topic! LOL!!

Anyway, what am I trying to say here is, I wasn't complaining, but I just want to say that whatever your condition is, if you sick, but still not that "weak" till you can't do anything else, just stop calling your day is a bad one, because God, never gives any bad days to you. Not even once. Everyday is a good and blessed day, remember that. It is all about how you're going to spend your day. It's all depends on you and how you'll see and overcome things that might come to you that day. If you failed, you'll just ruin your "good" day into "bad" one. It's all depends on us, how we see it with different point of view. When you have a problem, just think positively, and think that there are so many people that might be not as lucky as you and got bigger problems than yours. Appreciate what you've already had until this second and try your best to not complaining, and don't forget to have this gratitude in you.

Well, I still have much more to say, but I won't make this too long, save the words for next time. I still have a work to do, so, I am out~

Have a great and blessed day everyone! :)

P.S. Pardon me, if there's a typo(s), error, misspelling, etc. I can't face it too long to re-read and correcting the typos and hey! I am not a perfect person and English isn't my first language, mind my bad grammars or whatever it is!! *Cheers* :D

Every day is a good day to be alive, whether the sun's shining or not. ---Marty Robbins

Daily Motion

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This what is going to happened when you have something to write on but you didn't write it right away. My postponement made me out of idea about what to write, while I am so in a mood for blogging. And you know, the clock is ticking, while I'm thinking real hard about what to write. Now it's almost 11 a.m. I gotta go. Have to cook for the whole family. So I guess I'll be back later on to write again. Let's hope the mood stays this way :)

See ya!

Nothing that is complete breathes. ---Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin