Ispahan

I've always wanted to recreate Pierre Herme's Ispahan long before I even knew what they were! When we were living in London, I'd always see these little pink macarons filled with raspberries and they always caught my attention because they were the prettiest little things! I then had one at Claridge's afternoon tea and my love affair with macarons began! They were divine! So when I began my baking journey, the first thing I attempted were pink macarons filled with fresh raspberries.

 

When my macarons were failing me, I started troubleshooting on the internet (isn't google the best?) and that was when I discovered I was creating a mock Ispahan.  So what is the Ispahan? There are several versions, but essentially it is a macaron with lychee, rose and raspberry.  In Herme's book, the centre comprises of raspberry jelly surrounded by a rose and lychee ganache.  I omitted the raspberry jelly and used fresh raspberries instead because they're much more visually appealing!

 

I love fresh raspberries and despite them being so expensive at the moment, I put the Ispahan  on the afternoon tea menu as I just could not resist having them! They're just too damn pretty! 

Now I wasn't sure whether to admit this, but I have a confession to make - I still have not made a genuine Ispahan yet! :(   The problem was the rose and lychee ganache, it just ended up being a runny mess, not pipeable at all, despite refrigerating it and even letting it sit in the freezer!  That wouldn't do for the afternoon tea, so I ended up making up another batch of ganache, this time I put less lychee puree in the ganache.  Because the lychee flavour was so subtle, I omitted the rose essence as the smell is so overpowering I was afraid it would dominate the whole macaron.

After almost 48 hours of the rose and lychee ganache sitting in the fridge, it ended up becoming pipeable so I ended up using them with the leftover macaron shells!

So there you have it, the Ispahan in two separate macarons!

Mini Profiterole Tower

OMG let me just say what a crazy CRAZY couple of weeks it has been! I am absolutely exhausted and that is an understatement! I've not been baking much these days, but baking is soon to be all I will be doing as I embark on a project to cater a whole afternoon tea function at our new cafe.  Yep, you heard right, I have an official booking for afternoon tea and yes, we have a NEW cafe! OMG!

So with our new cafe having recently settled where I have been working at these past few weeks, you can understand why baking and blogging have slid down the list of priorities.  But with the afternoon tea booking coming up VERY soon, I've had to make time to practise some creations.  This is my first official function and I want it to be absolutely perfect!

 I've decided that I will put these little babies on the menu! Aren't they absolutely adorable? They're miniature profiterole towers, filled with whipped cream and glazed with a chocolate sauce.

It's really difficult to get an appreciation of how tiny these little babies are, so I placed them against a teacup and you can see how tiny they are.  Each profiterole only measures about 1-1.5cm, so each tower is only about 4cm high. OMG, so cute!   

I love being able to peel away each profiterole one by one, but its really not necessary as you can pop the whole thing in your mouth in one bite! But that would take the fun away from eating this! 

As one of the guests at the afternoon tea follows this blog, I've decided not to publish this post on my facebook profile until after the event, as I don't want to ruin the surprise for her and the other guests! I really hope I can pull this off - I have such nervous excitement building up in me! Fingers crossed! Who knows, maybe one day in the future, these afternoon teas will be a regular occurrence at the new cafe! That would be awesome!

Gingerbread House

I've struggled to find time to bake recently (explanations to follow in due course) so I thought I would re-hash an old creation of mine.

About 10 months ago, my blood, sweat and tears went into baking a gingerbread house in honour of baby girl’s first Christmas.  It was such a harrowing experience that almost a year has past and I still cannot bring myself to destroy the gingerbread house!

Baby girl would only have been around 4 weeks when I decided to embark on this mammoth task and anyone with a 4 week old baby will know exactly how wrecked you feel ALL the time, so embarking on a project such as this is really the last thing you would want to be doing!

Clearly, sleep deprivation had led me to not think straight as I seemed to have forgotten my last experience at baking a gingerbread house.  It was about 5 years ago that I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if I baked a gingerbread house for my niece’s birthday having absolutely no idea how involved it would be.  Having spent two days baking and decorating it, and also having used Pythagoras’ theorem for designing the tepee shaped house (who would have thought that would ever have come in handy, seriously who?), I said to myself, NEVER again! Particularly after the soul crushing experience of having my niece and her friends rip into the gingerbread house in a matter of seconds, leaving it to look like the aftermath of a hurricane (what was I expecting from 7 year olds - admiration from a safe distance? Yeah right)!

So with a bout of amnesia, off I went.  After SEVEN days, the gingerbread house was complete! The seven days consisted of firstly getting out the ruler and pen to measure a house, then baking two lots of gingerbread (I stupidly halved the recipe and then realised I required the FULL recipe - duh), and then about 5 days of decorating all while in a zombie like state. Needless to say, I was well and truly over it by the time I finished it!  

However, with the memories no longer so raw, I forget about all the pain that went into it and it makes me think that just like child birth, I could perhaps do this again!

As my piping skills weren’t great, I had to pipe and re-pipe the writing on the plaque so you can see the smears across it!

I must credit C as he designed the love heart made from musk sticks.

The back of the house.  The musk stick picket fence was also C's creation!

One side of the house. 

This was the last of the walls to complete and by this stage I just wanted to finish the darn thing and so I opted for the quickest solution and stuck two candy canes to the wall.  I ended up liking this side best!

 So what do you do with leftover gingerbread dough? Make gingerbread men of course!