Ye Olde Post #1: Sponge Cake and French Macarons

I suppose I'll just get started here. Yesterday was Pi Day and I did a little something to celebrate it:

I brought the cake and macarons into the astronomy department for this thing we have called Cookie Hour. Normally it's at 4:00pm, but for Pi Day, we had it at 1:59pm, naturally.

The cake is a two-layer genoise sponge cake with recipe by Mary Berry from The Great British Bake Off. This show is particularly good because it's like a cooking class disguised as a baking competition. Season One is on Netflix ;). Anyway, the sponge cake is filled with a vanilla pastry cream and topped with a bittersweet chocolate ganache. I weighed the cake with the macarons on it and, coincidently, it's exactly 3.14lbs!

The macarons are plain (meaning no extra flavoring beyond their natural sweet almond allure) and I adhered them to the cake with a marshmallow filling I made with a meringue, corn syrup, and some stovetop heat. The macarons were a bit under mixed, so they did not come out as smooth as they should be. I use Mindy Cone's book for these. By the way, the parchment paper I used is by Nordic Ware and it is the best quality parchment I've found in about 8 years of baking.

I'll probably use the next few posts to talk about some of the things I've baked in the past and give my experience making them. I'm hoping to lead into space-themed baked goods at some point.

The cake isn't 3.14lbs; I never weighed it.


:^)