Macarons and petits fours secs

Last week in class we made macarons and petits fours secs. Petits fours secs are dry petits fours, or rather cookies, biscuits, and small cakes that aren't frosted, such as madeleines and financiers. We had a ton of cookies and macarons, and I was able to box some up for a birthday party this weekend.




Most of the macarons were made using a new method that I haven't tried before. The almond powder was added to part of the egg whites to form a paste and then mixed into cooked sugar meringue. I'm used to folding in all the dry ingredients, but our macarons had a good consistency across the board, so perhaps I'll switch to this method going forward.





I got to make some chocolate covered biscuits, saffron mango macarons with apricot, and these sable arlequin cookies, which were quite fun to make.







With ten students, each making a flavor of macaron and a couple types of petits four secs, we had quite an impressive spread.











On an interesting side note, Chef brought in a pumpkin from his garden with hopes to make pumpkin pie. I don't know about the French, but their idea of "American Pumpkin Pie" is very far from what I'm used to back in the states. First of all a tart is very different from a pie, and this pie was too brown and had some sort of meringue on top. Anyways, I'm getting over the flu so apathy outweighs the desire to argue. I'll just let you be the judge.