The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

Funnily enough, I’ve never been excessively interested in macarons. I appreciate their beauty and the degree of difficulty involved in their success. As many people have said before, it’s amazing how complex a process it is to get right, considering macarons consist of merely three ingredients. So I have all the respect in the world for bakers out there such as Helen, Aran and Julia who love these sugary treats and manage time and again to present perfect and creative versions of them.

With regards to this month’s challenge, I had every intention of attempting Claudia Fleming’s recipe, but my brain was unfortunately asleep the day I stepped into the kitchen. It was only when half way through the process that I realised I had been baking on autopilot, and had somehow managed to whip up a batch of my normal macaron recipe, as opposed to the one provided for the challenge!

So I’m not sure if my contribution really counts towards this challenge, but here it is anyway. I made some bite-sized macarons flavoured with black sesame powder and paste, with dried seaweed (nori) garnishing the shells before baking. The combination worked well together, in my opinion, also because I quite like adding savoury elements to things that are quite sweet (as we all know macarons can be).

To keep things interesting, an impromptu dessert macaron was also cobbled together from items I scavenged from the fridge and pantry. Chocolate sauce, ganache, cake, cherries and vanilla cream formed a little nod to my obsession with Black Forest flavours.

Thank you Ami, for bringing macarons into the Daring Bakers repertoire!

Once I forgot the butter in a cake. It turned out sweet, but dry. Nothing lubricating each little crumb, and as I tried to eat it, it clung to my throat a little longer than I wanted it to, as if in vengeance. As I tried to cough or breathe,

it said :

Hello there baker
who likes to spend hours, thumbing through crisp pages of unused cookbooks.
Who is obsessed with ‘perfect’ banana bread, and
who has eaten cake for breakfast, or dessert for dinner.
Who chooses the light of the oven over the sun glinting off leaves on trees.

Look out the window.

Do you feel the hours slipping through your fingers like butter, or clump between your nails, like flour. Is it hard to remember the important things that make up this crazy recipe called life?

Sometimes you need to take a break. Rewind to the time when you didn’t have so many different flours in your cupboard, or when you never used to run out of sugar twice in one week. When the question was What shall I do today, rather than What shall I bake today?

I coughed. The crumb crawled down to the pit of my stomach.

Screw you, little crumb, I said.

I tossed the rest of the cake out, and made fudge instead.

White chocolate and salted lemon fudge :
((Just like life, often the best recipes incorporate a little sweet, sour and salty. To keep it interesting. This lovely fudge recipe is from Desserts by David Everitt-Matthias)

100ml double cream
750g granulated sugar
250ml liquid glucose
400g white chocolate, chopped
50g unsalted butter, diced
125g salted lemons, finely chopped [I used preserved lime, but David salts his own lemons with coarse sea salt, bay leaf, lemon juice and olive oil]

Put the double cream, granulated sugar and glucose in a large, heavy-based saucepan and bring slowly to the boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Raise the heat and boil until it reaches 140’C on a sugar thermometer, stirring frequently to prevent it catching on the bottom of the pan.

Transfer the mixture to the bowl of a freestanding food mixer and start beating on low speed. Add the chopped chocolate in 3 stages, allowing each one to be incorporated before adding the next. Then add the butter and beat well on low speed. Finally mix in the salted lemons.

Pour the mixture into a baking tray lined with baking parchment, place another sheet of parchment on top and leave to cool. Put it in the fridge to set. Cut it into the desired shapes and store in an airtight container until needed.

You could also pour some melted white chocolate on the fudge before cutting it.

To my neighbour who snores every night, enabling me to finally understand the allusion to chainsaws.

To M who sent me a text message while dining in what is meant to be the best unagi restaurant in Tokyo. (Meanwhile, I was having a very pedestrian pasta dinner at home).

To the work-friend who readily listens when I have woes to air.

To Julia, and her obsession with macarons, begetting a how-to guide.

To Pierre Hermes, whose basic macaron recipe I use all the time.

And to all those people who have been reading and leaving comments even though I haven’t had much time to return the favour of late :

Thank you.