Its been a long time since I last posted anything but things have been pretty busy. Move Over Cupcake has found a home that it will share with other baked, cooked, steamed goods. We are in the process of negotiating our lease so should have some good news to report soon. Meanwhile here are a few photographs of some of the Macarons I have been making for orders. Enjoy!

Take me to the moon! A macaron that blasts off in your mouth.

Pistachio macaron.

Strawberry Macaron.

Coconut Love

Rosewater

Back from Lenotre

The Lenotre class

I'm back and finally rested from a pretty intense trip to Lenotre, but it was worth the aching feet. I got to Paris Tuesday evening, and then took the train up to Plasier, which is where the Lenotre factory is based. Plasier is a tiny little town surrounded by farmland and factories. Lenotre, I found to my dismay, was further away, so it took me a while of hand gesturing, queuing in the wrong lane, getting soaked in the rain, before I finally managed to find the right bus that dropped me at my motel near Lenotre. Now I am being generous when I say motel - scary, smelly rooms from the set of The Evil Dead might be more near the mark. When I went into the lobby/bar to get my key, I realized I was the only female around, everyone else was male and dressed up in black trench coats!! I slept with the TV on.

The Lenotre University, which is based inside their factory, is one of the first proper pastry schools in France. It runs professional classes and courses for bakers and pastry chefs from around the world. In fact Pierre Herme, the Karl Lagerfield of the pastry world, was one of its alumni -or so Ive been told.

Rosemary Macaron

The next morning class started at 8 a.m. The chef Gerard was an MOF, which is one of the greatest honours of the food world.( It is  like being knighted for services to food in France).He walked us through the basic macaron recipe and then put us to work. That day we made macarons for 11 hours straight!! My feet were aching, but the good thing was I was too exhausted to care about axe wielding murderers and slept like a log.

Salted Caramel macarons

We made macarons using a French meringue, which is a technique I have been using. It is more fiddly and difficult than the Italian meringue but the end results are a more shiny macaron. The first step is to make a TPT, which is equal parts sugar and almonds, which is then sifted through a tamis.

Raspberry Macarons

 The eggs are beaten to a froth, the sugar is added slowly to the mix so that it becomes a glossy, shiny meringue. I was told off for adding the sugar too early. Patience is a virtue, I was told!

Ginger Macarons

The macarons are then piped out in neat little circles. Since piping is one of my weakest points, the chef made me pipe and pipe and pipe till I got the little buggers right. "Hold the bag straight and flick," he shouted. "Fleeeek!"

Tonka Beans

The piped macarons are then put in the oven. The first time the chef realized too late that someone had filled the industrial oven with water (don't ask why) so that the first batch of macarons came out looking like dog poo. A lot of cursing in French followed.

Mixed Fruit macaron

The macarons were finally baked at a high temperature for five minutes to form the little feet, then the temperature was lowered. One of the best parts of the lesson was learning how to get the macarons off the baking sheets, which believe me is not an easy task. All you do is fill a big mug with water, lift the baking sheet and splosh the tray with water. The steam helps release the macarons from the sheet. (I have a photograph somewhere of the soaking wet sheets, Ill add it later).

Hollandaise

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Amaretti

We also made different kinds of macarons, from Italian style Amaretto biscuits to Hollandaise, which are a very crunchy, almondy rustic cousin of the more refined Macaron.

Our final day presentation

After the course finished I went back to Paris for a day and a half and ate my way through all the more famous macaron shops. Ialso bought a lot of ingredients that we don't find here, from the finest Spanish almonds to organic food colouring. I had to buy another suitcase to fit everything in!
Back in the UK, as I struggled down the Eurorail a guy behind me quipped "Oooh, smuggling the kitchen sink are we?!" I was home again.

Menu

So, here it is - the official menu. Thanks a bunch to Tania who did a wonderful job with the design and the  illustrations. She has also done the business cards, boxes and is currently helping me with the website.
Here is the first image of one of business cards. We have decided to do several different colour combinations, just to keep things interesting!

Things are coming along and hopefully the website, and hence officially the business, will be ready to launch in another month or so. In the meantime, I am still taking orders and delivering them in our temporary boxes. Yay!

Macaron School

Two years ago when I was doing my Cuisine Diploma at Le Cordon Bleu, I also decided to take a three month long Pastry course. It was with my nose slightly in the air that I showed up for the first class. I had deboned teeny birds without cutting them up, I had dug out a small fish from the inside of a bigger fish - I was strong, Pastry pshaw! Piece of cake!
Hah! I was quickly put in my place when I was told to dip my finger in boiling sugar to test the degree of firmness. "Do eeet!" sneered the pastry chef teaching us. Needless to say, I didn't. I stuck to the sugar thermometer. There is a limit.
Anyway, the point of the story was that even though I trained as a chef, life in its strange twists decided that my business will not be in savory but in sweet.
I had made macarons only once in class and surprisingly was one of the few people who got it right the first time. So when I started making them for my business I thought (again!) Piece of cake!
Hah! (again!)
I've shed my share of tears when I've over mixed the batter so that soon as I pipe the mix out it spreads and spreads and spreads. I've had the oven too hot, then too cold. I've shaken my fist at dark rainy clouds, as the humidity made my macarons flat. I've read all the macaron books I could lay my hands on. And with a lot of practise I have learned a lot. Now 95% of my batch turns out perfect.
But 95% does not a good business make. So I've decided to enrol in a 2 day course at Ecole Lenotre in  Paris, end of March.
(Oh alright! It was more the thought of going away by myself to Paris and hitting all the patisseries on the way!!)
So I am dusting out my chef's tunic, cleaning up the clogs and heading out into a macaron coloured sunset....
More on that later...

Baby oh baby

Just finished making 20 macarons for a friend hosting a Christening over the weekend. I ended up making full batches, really don't know why except I felt like making lots n lots of macarons, which means I made a total of more than 80 macarons. Now that's what I call a full baking day!

I made some simple blueberry macrons filled with blue berry jam and decorated them with sugar prams and babygros. I got distracted during the macronage stage, the doorbell rang, lunch burned, usual stuff, and over folded the mixture - which meant that the first batch came out looking like blue CDs. So back I went again, grumbling and moaning, and this time paid more attention to what my hands were doing, stopping one beat short of overdoing it again.

These macarons are called English Rose, they are strawberry with a cream, jam and fresh mint filling inside. These babies are so light and summery that  I had to perch butterflies on top of them. :)

That's  Pistachio in the upper left corner. One of my favourite ice creams growing up in Pakistan was Pistachio. My uncle would drive us to this hole in the wall parlour where they would take your order while you were sitting in the car and bring tall glasses of ice cream out to you. They did a killer Pistachio ice cream, very rich and creamy,made with real Pistachios from the north. I  wanted to recreate the same flavours so I  blitzed two packets of pistachios into a fine powder before folding them into a light buttercream. I also dusted the shells with the ground pistachios as a garnish before baking the macarons.
The dark brown one in the upper right corner is deep chocolaty with a wonderfully aromatic, herby center and is one of my favourite macarons- so of course I had to call it Darcy as in Mr.Darcy. The chocolate shells are bound together by a white chocolate and basil filling. Absolutely dreamy!!
And last, but not least, in the left bottom corner is a Salted Caramel macaron all sparkly with gold leaf.

I have been trying to source macaron boxes for the last couple of months. Except for a factory in Amsterdam that does mini boxes (I assume they are made for macarons the size of coins!) there is nothing out there. Since the business is all online, the right box is crucial. If the cardboard is too thin then the macarons will break in transit, I know I tried sending some in flimsy boxes to friends, all they got were crumbs..

For the time being  I ordered some chocolate boxes and happily realized that if  I laid the macarons face up, a box could fit in 12. Add some bright tissue paper and the end result is not too shabby!

I think these boxes might even survive the postal journey. Will be mailing a couple of boxes to friends in London to test them out.  Email me if interested!

Tiramisu

I was in the Italian Dolomites recently for a skiing holiday. Every day at four in the afternoon the hotel would lay out three or four different types of cakes, from creamy Austrian sponges to custardy Italian doughnuts. I tried to resist them all (emphasis on tried!) until the day they served a Tiramisu, and then I went for firsts, seconds and then thirds. Tiramisu is my weakness, soft, pillowy biscuits, deep intense coffee, cloudy mounds of cream..What is there not to like I ask you??
And that got me thinking, lets try making a Tiramisu macaron. I am sure it has been done before but I wanted to try out the flavours myself, so I broke down the Tiramisu into its basic flavours: coffee, mascarpone, a little Marsala and spongy biscuit.

I made a basic macaron and dusted the top with cocoa powder, just as you would dust a finished Tiramisu and popped it into the oven to bake.
I then made the filling by whipping some Marsala with half a tub of mascarpone. To get that intense hit of espresso, I made a thick coffee syrup and folded it into the mascarpone. The result was a deep, voluptuously creamy filling. As I wanted the filling to be a little bit more stable, I mixed in some Italian buttercream before piping it onto the macaron shells.

I ate a couple on the spot, dredged up some self control and packaged some of the macarons as a present for a friend. Then guiltily opened up one of the boxes, snuck out a couple to have with tea. Bliss!

I have to add, my friend Daniela makes the most amazing Tiramisu in the world. Whenever she brings a tray over I want to snatch it up, lock myself in the bathroom. This macaron is dedicated to her.

Long time no write

It has been a long time since my first post. Work on Move Over, Cupcake had to slow down for the holidays but really picked up speed in the last week. I opened a bank account, which means MOC is ready to do real business, got quotes for insurance (whew!), met with a designer/illustrator called Tania who understood exactly what I wanted from the brand - a great meeting of minds that left me feeling excited and pumped up about the whole project. Cant wait for her first samples!
And also got two new clients! One for a christening next weekend so will be posting photos soon of the finished products.
I also experimented with two new flavours which will be making their way into the flavour list, Honey and Ginger and Tiramisu.
The idea for the Honey and Ginger came from Tania, who handed me a box of these sweet and spicy chews, and asked me to see if I could do something with them. The chews are a fiery, yet sweet and zingy combination of honey and ginger, absolutely amazing! The challenge was to tweak the flavours so they would suit a delicate macaron. I thought about using real ginger but that would have overwhelmed the macaron, so opted for the more subtle heat of candied ginger. I added honey to the buttercream and the result was pretty good!!

I added some sparkle to the piped batter. Surely such a zingy, sparkly macaron deserves a few stars!

I used buttercream for the filling, adding Manuka honey and thinly sliced candied ginger.

The end product looked quite pretty I have to say, and tasted quite good too. It wasn't as fiery as the actual chews but it did deliver a kick, like taking a bite out of the sun! Definitely going on the flavour list.