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The food blogging adventures of a Canadian twenty-one year old who frequently whips up awful puns. When I first wrote a recipe tutorial for French macarons in 2012, I couldnt have imagined that, even to this day, it would be the most popular post on IronWhisk. Back then, the macaron craze was just gaining steam. Today, the almond-meringue cookies,... which sandwich a ganache or jam filling, are ubiquitous. The macarons popularity means a plethora of surprisingly different recipes are available to play with. What, then, is the best way to make this famous cookie? Over the past few weeks, I have made it my mission to find out. After getting my hands on the formerly secret recipes of the worlds top pastry chefs, and baking dozens of batches and hundreds of macarons, my side-by-side tests and surveys provide the much-needed answers. When I visited legendary pastry chef Dominique Ansels eponymous bakery in New York a few weeks ago (I wrote about the adventure and the subsequent canelé experiments in my previous post ), I managed to get my paws on a raspberry and lychee pavlova. One of the staff members had told me it was her favourite dessert in the pastry display case and, since it was also the most eye-catching one, I had to try it. Ansels website describes the raspberry and lychee pavlova as light-as-air lychee meringue filled with fresh raspberries, raspberry jam, mascarpone whipped ganache, and lychee whipped ganache. The pastry was splendid; the meringue was crunchy on the outside but chewy on the inside, with just the lightest hints of lychee flavour. The ganaches complemented the raspberries wonderfully.Read More