The Beautiful Nut
It's a generally acknowledged fact that you only learn to appreciate certain things in life when you're older. These things can include (but are not limited to) white wine (up until your 25th birthday it's just expired grape juice), vanilla ice cream (when drenched in hot chocolate sauce, that is), Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (unless you're my fiancé, in which case you need an additional decade or two and/or earplugs), and, of course, the ultimate guilty pleasure reality show - MasterChef. I never thought of myself as the right demographic for MasterChef as it takes me 30 minutes to peel a potato which I end up overcooking/undercooking anyway, and guess what, it still had some skin on! But now, a couple of seasons deep, I'm completely hooked. I realized that I don't need to know how to cook to appreciate the show, I just need to appreciate food - and boy do I ever! My fiancé watches the series with me (he is the cook in our household and a damn good one at that), and now, whenever we eat something, we think that - through osmosis, I guess - we are qualified food critics. We cut into our meals and say stuff like, "Hm. Perfect consistency. Crispy on the outside whilst glistening on the inside."
"With beautiful nuttiness?"
"Why, of course! Beautiful nuttiness is a given!"
So, inspired by MasterChef, I decided to take the plunge one night and bake a batch of the Finnish 80's classic mokkapalat (mocha squares). After nobody died as a consequence of consuming the fruits of my labor, a thought of a naive wooden puppet that thinks she's a real girl crossed my mind: Perhaps I've missed my true calling in life. Perhaps I was always meant to be (drumroll please) a pastry chef!
Unfortunately, this revelation was met with less enthusiasm by my fiancé:
"Honey?" I said one night, sitting on the couch with him.
"Yes?" he said, blissfully oblivious to what was to come.
"I'm gonna ask you something but before you answer, I really want you to think about it, okay?" I told him.
"Okay."
"Do you think that it's my true calling to be - wait for it - a pastry chef?"
Oh, the things I put this poor man through! His face adopted the look of someone who tries very hard to be a supportive partner but whose significant other is making it really really difficult. Now, by this point he has learned to deliver bad news to me through the so-called feedback hamburger model (I've written about this more in a previous post), which, in the spirit of this post, we shall hereinafter refer to as the feedback Oreo cookie. In case you're unfamiliar with this model, the basic idea is to sandwich your negative feedback between two positive statements. However, this time the cookie didn't quite crumble that way (see what I did there?). Instead, this is what happened:
Top cookie: "Honey, I love that you have such a healthy... let's say, imagination." (Promising beginning)
Cream filling: "But, as we all know, you're a little bit on the clumsy side." (The mandatory negative feedback - also, NOT true!)
Bottom (shattered) cookie: "So, for your own physical and mental health, I think it's best you don't become a pastry chef at this time." (Ending on a positive note? - MISSION FAIL)
Naturally, I was in disbelief of such negativity. "But then the world will never get to try my pastries!" I cried.
My fiancé blanked at me before delivering his final blow, "Oh, I think the world will survive."
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| Mokkapalat! |
Case Study: Macarons
Now, if I listened to every naysayer that came my way, I would never leave my bed. In fact, the only time anybody has managed to talk me out of any of my wacky ideas was my father when I was nine and wanted to participate in a skiing competition after having acquired my first skis just two days earlier. With only a couple of days' notice, my poor father tried being encouraging, he tried coaching me, he tried tough love, until he finally couldn't take it anymore, so he pulled me aside and with pain in his eyes said, "Listen. I can't let you go to that competition."
"But why, Daddy?" I was surprised as in my mind I'd been doing great.
"Because everybody will laugh at you and that will break my heart."
Look. It's not that I listened to naysayers back then either, but the old man was twice my size and controlled my candy supply, so I thought it was best to pick my battles. But that was then. The great thing about being an adult is that when you decide to do something crazy, nobody can take your candy away from you. Come hell or high water (embarrassment or injury), you do you and everybody else will just have to suck it up.
As it happened, I was only emboldened by my fiancé's naysaying. As an aspiring pastry chef, I figured it was my downright responsibility to find out whether I got what it took. So, with the confidence of an overly-ambitious fool, I decided to attempt to bake the thing that according to MasterChef's Christina Tosi "requires a huge amount of technical skill to get just right" - MACARONS!
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| Macarons the way nature intended (a.k.a from the supermarket) |
Somebody at this point might say, "But wouldn't you want to start with something a little simpler? Like muffins?" To that I say, "Go hard or go home" or, as is more appropriate given the topic of this post, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!"
And yes, I suppose I could have started with some lame-ass muffins, but I figured macarons would be the truest test of my pastry chef skills - I would either go down as the captain of my macaron ship or rise to the occasion like a properly mixed macaron batter in the oven (this post is brought to you by cheesy baking analogies). Besides, the idea of biting into a macaron, savoring it in my mouth, and then uttering something like, "Hm, this reminds me of the Paris of my youth" was irresistible. (For the record: I've no clue what the Paris of my youth was like, but it sounded like something cool to say.)
Luckily enough, partly because he didn't want to cut the wings of my dreams and partly because he didn't want me to burn the kitchen down, my fiancé agreed to assist me with my attempt to figure out my destiny or at least go down with the burned-down macaron ship with me. My hero!
International Baking
My career as a pastry chef almost ended in the baking aisle at the supermarket, when faced with the task of choosing the right ingredients. At this point, someone might say, "Really? Your parents had to run 5 km to school every morning in two meters of snow and this is what breaks you?" (Yeah, I never believed those stories, Mom and Dad). Well, in my defense I want to say that it's one thing to go to your friendly neighborhood supermarket and buy familiar ingredients, and a whole other thing to have to translate everything and find nothing that matches your translations at the store.
Let's examine exhibit A - powdered sugar.
According to our friend Google Translate, "powdered sugar" would translate to "sucre en poudre" here in French-speaking Belgium. Okay, before you say anything, I'm no dummy. If anybody knows that Google Translate is no replacement for a real translator, it is I. But even though I expected slight changes in the translation, I didn't expect to find a whole new word - impalpable!
I only had an inkling that this (picture above) might be the right product, and after half a lifetime in the store pondering my options, I finally decided to go for it. We headed to the register, and just when we had paid, my fiancé (who is Mexican) ever-so-nonchalantly mentioned, "Oh, yeah, I forgot! It's actually the same word - impalpable - for powdered sugar in Spanish, too." This revelation earned him a very very very long disapproving stare. Unfortunately, that very long stare was as much of a punishment as he was going to get because, knowing I would eventually need his co-operation with my macarons, getting into my "Never mind! I'll just do it myself!" mode would have been a grave mistake.
Another thing that falls into the category of #expatproblems is conversions. Ordinarily, this shouldn't be a problem for us as we have European measuring cups and live in Europe, but, apparently, we decided that life wasn't hard enough yet and ended up using an American recipe: Hello the world of Fahrenheits, ounces, and weirdly sized teaspoons and tablespoons!
Execution and Results
It is my long-held belief that - in baking as well as in life in general - most people are divided between those who weigh every single ingredient down to the last grain and those who free-pour. For example, my fiancé is a classic free-pourer: he's confident in his skills and doesn't sweat the small stuff. Me, I've always considered myself a classic rule-follower, but as it turns out, that's not the whole truth.
When making macarons, you may encounter all kinds of kitchen equipment that would normally gather dust in the back of your cupboard, such as a sieve. This is when I learned that I'm not just the opposite of a free-pourer but a weird mix between "I said 50 grams and not one gram more!" and "What? We don't need no fancy-schmancy sieve! I'm an independent woman, for God's sakes!" Not sure what it was about that sieve that threatened my independence, but oh well, I'm a woman and therefore being a complicated specimen is my birthright.
After a while, however, my fiancé - the free-pourer - managed to convince me of the importance of the sieve, so we used it. Now, I still don't know if it was necessary or not, but I do know I could have grown a decent-sized beard in the time it took us to pass the ingredients through that sieve. Sure hope it was worth it!
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| The infamous sieve |
We even tapped the batter (another instruction that seemed fancy-schmancy but, according to my fiancé, was crucial) when it was piped on the baking sheet, but then came the part that messed it all up for us - the oven.
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| Before oven |
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| After oven |
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| Second batch before oven |
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| Second batch after oven - doesn't look too bad... right? |
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| WRONG! |
We even put some Bailey's in the filling to compensate for the rest of the macaron, but turns out it was beyond the Bailey's fix. So, when I bit into my homemade macaron, I didn't say, "Hm, this reminds me of the Paris of my youth." Instead I said, "Hm, this reminds me of a Parisian house fire."
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| Two macarons: one from the supermarket, one made by Yours Truly. You'll never guess which is which. |
Soooo, maybe my first macaron attempt wasn't exactly MasterChef-worthy, but I'm nothing if not an eternal optimist, ERGO... stay tuned for PART II (sometime in the distant future)! Until then, happy baking!
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| Here's the prettiest one I could find (on the left, obviously). Can I just say... potential? |
