Yesterday was my very first lab day of the second semester! Due to my change in schedule, I now have baking lab days on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. My other classes include a math class (the math we do is probably the same things I did in the fourth grade), a communications class (where "learn" to write letters/emails/resumes) and a bakery management class that I also had last semester (probably the only class that may be helpful). I don't foresee any of these classes causing me any kind of trouble this term. So, for my first baking lab in approximately 4 weeks, we made two kinds of french macarons and honey praline tuiles. We had planned on making Florentines as well, but we ran out of time. We actually barely had time to finish these three recipes!  I had made macarons before at home, but I was looking forward to learning how to do them the RIGHT way... I had sort of made up how to do them before. My instructor, however, was very upset when he came to class. Apparently, those who are in charge of purchasing all of the ingredients for every class hadn't bought the right thing. You are supposed to use almond FLOUR when making french macarons, because it is very fine and easier to work with. They bought GROUND almonds instead... He was not pleased. Not at all. You can still make french macarons with ground almonds, except you end up wasting lots of almonds because you need to sift the almonds and only use the dust. You end up being left with big chunks of almonds. I thought that it wasn't THAT big of a deal, but my teacher wasn't happy. We started by making plain macarons that we would fill with a raspberry white chocolate filling. The cookies mostly consist of egg whites, sugar, almonds and icing sugar. We also added a little red food colouring to make them pink. You pipe this mixture onto parchment paper into toonie sized circles, then let it sit for approximately 15 minutes so that they develop a skin. This helps them keep their shape when baking. After making the plain macarons cookies, we made chocolate ones which take the same ingredients, but you add cocoa powder. We were going to make a chocolate cappuccino ganache to fill the chocolate cookies. For the white chocolate raspberry filling, all we did was melt the raspberry puree with the white chocolate, let it cool, then sandwiched a little between two macarons. For the ganache filling, we boiled heavy cream and Sucralose, then poured it over dark chocolate to melt. Once the chocolate melted, we added butter and coffee extract. Once this cooled enough to become a little thicker, we sandwiched a little between the chocolate macarons cookies. They looked very good! These macarons came out much better than my previous attempt at home. We then made the honey tuiles. We had made the batter for these cookies a few hours before baking because it had to sit for a while. Once it was ready, we spread a very thin layer of the batter onto parchment paper in a CD sized circle. These baked for very little time seeing as they were so thin and delicate. When they were baked, we quickly took them out of the oven and attempted to roll the cookies around a spoon creating a tube shape. This was extremely difficult because you needed to use your fingers, but the tuiles were piping hot! Needles to say that the tips of my fingers are sore today. Not many of my tuiles ended up being shaped properly as they would cool almost immediately after coming out of the oven and no longer be pliable. I think I ended up with 5 or 6 tuiles. With the successful cookies, we dipped the ends in chocolate, then filled them with a chocolate praline paste that we mixed with whipped cream. The ones that turned out looked fairly good. It is definitely a recipe that requires a lot of practice. I would say that my first day back was pretty successful! I felt good about what I made and they tasted very good. I'm looking forward to the next lab days.

Here is a picture of the macarons. I unfortunately don't have a picture of the tuiles. Since there weren't very many of them, they were consumed quickly by the family!