Baking at home

As I mentioned before, baking in California is a lot more difficult than baking in France. Scaling things from imperial system to metric, not having my tools on hand, and different ovens are just some of the few things that have attributed to my baking flops. It's not stopping me from continuing to bake though. Nowadays cookies and cupcakes don't seem that difficult and I'm always looking through my school cookbook for French desserts to make.

For a birthday, I made some pate a choux filled with chocolate pastry cream and chocolate drizzled on top.

Just as at school, I had to crack the oven a bit open during cooking so that the puffs wouldn't deflate when the oven was opened later on.

For my brother's dog's birthday (yes.. we celebrated a puppy's first birthday), I made some pupcakes and a chocolate fraisier for the humans. This cake is almost identical to the other fraisiers I've made with the exception of chocolate genoise and chocolate mousseline cream. The genoise was a bit dry; next time I'll need to soak it with more syrup.

I've also made several macaron attempts since a friend wanted me to teach her and some coworkers how to make French macarons.

Everything went well until I had to bake them. Per my recipe, I cracked the oven door open during baking. I think either because of the change in temperature, the macarons rose unevenly. I guess ovens must be a lot different here; after I closed the oven door they turned out fine.