When a Facebook friend announced on her status earlier this year that she had just booked a course with the Macarons and More cookery school I was overcome with envy. I had been looking at this course since they were launched. Come too, she said. That morning I hadn’t even dragged myself out of bed and I found myself parting with £140 in one hit. I was instantly on a high and feeling the same kind of feelings that most girls do when they’ve just treated themselves to a pair of designer shoes, guilt + excitement.
Baking is more popular than ever (I currently have a cake baking as a thank you gift for the wonderful neuroscience team at Addenbrookes). Between the end of my childhood and my engagement I hardly baked at all. It was a mad spur of the moment decision to bake our own wedding cupcake tower that had started it. During the long lonely days of maternity leave when our first baby was on the way it was my therapy. Then my babies started to have birthdays and with a basic vanilla sponge perfected I naturally progressed into decorating cakes.
You can’t go anywhere without seeing twee illustrations of a perfectly frosted cupcake on notebooks, book covers, greetings cards, wrapping paper etc. Personally I prefer my notebook covered with Breaking Bad’s Heisenberg to scrawl my recipes and conversions in but each to their own. Television is filled with shows such as Bake Off, Ace of Cakes, Amazing Wedding Cakes and you can’t escape Mary Berry. There are afternoon tea shops popping up left right and centre, cupcakes that are far too big and piled high with swirls of buttercream at every turn. The home baking and cake decorating market is saturated but somehow I manage to find business.
One thing has always eluded me though. These mysterious macarons. So bright and pretty made in every colour and flavour imaginable. Perfect and round little treats. I can bake so therefore I must be able to make those. WRONG! Granted my first batch tasted ok but they were the ugliest bake I had ever produced. I snuck them into my son’s lunch box and told him that they were almond biscuits. He loved them. What did I do that was so wrong? It was so disheartening (and expensive) seiving all those almonds was boring, waiting for those piped shells to dry was boring, prizing the baked shells off the paper as they had stuck yet again was BORING! I never achieved the perfect little pretty treats that I desired. I didn’t even want to eat them, I just wanted to be able to look at them and say I did that. Just like all those cupcakes I kept knocking out and feeding to the bin. It didn’t help that the contestants on The Great British Bake Off kept saying how difficult they were and yet kept turning out batch after batch of perfectly formed little circles of joy. Every blog post and magazine article used a different recipe. Filled to the brim of dos and don’ts. You CAN’T make macarons when it’s raining, don’t bother. You MUST sieve your almonds TWICE. Age your egg whites, fresh eggs whites is an instant fail. In fact it was almost as if they were setting you up to fail before you’d even switched the oven on. It would take a good few months before I could gear myself up for another attempt.
I’ve worked in Norwich city centre for nearly 12 years and when Macarons & More opened in the Royal Arcade I would gaze into the windows like it was a prestigious art gallery. It all looked so beautiful. Towers of macarons stood tall and wonderful and yet they are impossible to make but these guys knew what they were doing and it rains a hell of a lot in Norfolk so the blogs must be wrong. It wasn’t until earlier this year that I actually bought macarons from the shop. Admiring their beauty was enough for me I got as much pleasure from looking at them as most would from scoffing a box if 12. I longed to recreate them and was starting to be asked whether I could make them and had to say no.
Unfortunately just two weeks before I was due to attend the course my brain malfunctioned. Initially I was told that if they couldn’t fill the place then I would lose it. I sat in my hospital bed feeling incredibly bitter and angry. My brain had bled and to make matters worse I couldn’t watch Captain America Civil War, the Star Wars Blu Ray I had on preorder, bake all those cake orders, drink wine or make macarons. Fortunately I was rescheduled to attend the course on June 18th so yesterday off I trotted to make macarons. I woke up feeling groggy. I didn’t really want to go. It was the Travis gig all over again. I feel angry at this aneurysm for taking away the fun from everything and making everything a chore. I knew that I did really want to go somewhere inside my brain it’s like enthusiasm has been deleted.
Now I have a confession to make. I have never watched a single episode of Master Chef. I know zero about it and have no interest in it. I heard that the man behind the macarons, Tim Kinnaird was a former Master Chef contestant but to me that means quite little. The man who serviced our boiler last winter had also been a contestant. What really attracted me to the course was that he held all the secrets to creating perfect macarons and to me that made him a genius.
On arrival we were welcomed with a tea/coffee and cake. It goes without saying that I accepted a cup of tea and I did the cake also even though my taste buds are screwed and I can’t taste anything sweet. I could appreciate its texture and nuttiness but sadly I didn’t get to enjoy it as much as the other ladies appeared to. We were shown into the kitchen and my first challenge was meeting a Kenwood stand mixer. I’m KitchenAid through and through. The switches were all in the wrong place and I instinctively went to the left to adjust the speed instead of the right not just once but every single time. What I loved most about the kitchen was that Hannah was on hand who would mysteriously appear and whip away your used bowls and spatulas to be washed up without you even noticing, if only there was such a magical force as this in my own kitchen. There was a coffee break whilst the shells were baking and I had a much-needed cuppa. When I returned to the kitchen my beautiful macaron shells were ready, I removed them from the oven and they looked like real life macaron shells. I could hardly believe my luck. You CAN make macarons when it’s raining after all! Filling them was hard work, by this point I was overcome with tiredness combine that with the heat of the kitchen made it difficult to stand up right. I could physically feel my brain inside my skull buzzing and turning over and I have to admit it was a relief to finish and be served a wonderful lunch. My head still feels heavy and after being headache free for a week or two that familiar dull ache has returned. I broke my rules after trying to fight it and fell asleep on the sofa.
Overall a fantastic, informative course that I would highly recommend to anyone with a love of baking and cooking. It solved many issues that I had been having and I discovered many valuable tips along the way such as a whisk isn’t always a whisk. I could whisk by hand all day long with my cheep and nasty whisk and still it wouldn’t whip cream but I actually managed to over whisk cream with the whisk in their kitchen! I would definitely consider enrolling on the advanced course to learn more, better my skills and the range I currently offer, I notice that there’s one in a couple of weeks but I think I will wait a while for my brain to calm down a bit and regain some normality.
Lady with the Headache 