Macaron & Breaking Dawn

After that inconsistent fiasco with my previous few macarons attempt, I decided to do some tweaking to the preparation and lo and behold...

French Macarons

The feets came back and so did the smooth shell. But the interior is kinda shit, there's a lot of air pocket in the macaron but it looked nice so I thought everything was fine. Until I decided to do them again and it came out looking like crap again. 

So I decided to use another method which required a bit of sugar cooking called the Italian Meringue Method which apparently was more forgiving but required a lot more steps. I did everything by myself, never had I wished I had a Kitchen Aid, a proper baking tray and a huge oven all at the same time so desperately, and surprisingly I actually managed to make the meringue without getting any burns from the hot sugar syrup... because I wasn't being moronic and directly pouring the hot syrup anywhere near the spinning whisk.

Italian Macaron +Elle and Vire Butter.

 Cold Storage sells them now, I squealed a little when I saw them (the butter). It's sad

Makes me wonder what reaction I will have when they start selling Valrhona.

The shells for this macarons were so much better, but the trouble was not worth it to be honest. There was a lot of cracking happening at places it shouldn't crack. Honestly the oven's shit because the hotspots were all over the place. As if my damn oven isn't small enough, now I have to avoid placing my pre-cooked macaron batter at certain spots so they won't crack.

I really want those ovens that will rotate as they bake but honestly there's no space in the kitchen and I have this fear that I might accidentally lock myself inside and bake myself alive because it's that big.






So anyways.



I recently went to watch Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2.





 It's actually pretty entertaining, I mean it's not the type of movie that will leave an impression after watching it but it's definitely not as bad as 9Gag make them out to me, 9gag is just the place where ignorance is embraced with love so I shouldn't have based my judgement on the latest Twilight series base what the community there says.


That being said though, the first few Twilight movies were shit. It's too much romance and too little action and I'm not one that will go "Awww" for romances... says the guy who squealed for Elle and Vire Butter. The good thing about Breaking Dawn part 2 was the action scene at the end, I have to admit looking at Dakota Fanning's head getting ripped off by the wolf was oddly satisfying.

Not this Dakota obviously. She was too precious.

And they also introduced a lot of other Vampires that had no lines to speak at all except a few head nods to show they agreed with whatever the main characters had to say, which was sad and I remembered this fat vampire lady who reminded me of the writer Stephanie Myer herself. 

As someone who don't follow Twilight as stalkishly as the Twi-hards, she looked like Myers to me and it's funny because I was watching a behind the scenes video of the showdown scene where the Vampires and Werewolves starting running towards the bad guys, you can see that actress up top lagging behind. 

They have Character Posters for all the Vampires, it's crazy, I mean probably 80% of them don't even have speaking lines and they get their own posters plastered all over the world, or maybe at Subway Stations and like places no one really visits but since Twilight is making so much money why not just stick it in the Priority Toilet Cubicles as well because it's not weird having a face staring at you as you are squeezing something out from your rear orifice. On second thought, actually a lot of people use those toilets, disabled or not. If they really did that though, they should use this one...

She kept looking like she was constipated through out the movie.

Exactly.

Fuck you Inconsistency!

A few weeks ago, I had this sudden wave of baking successes.

First I made a few cupcakes that came out really well, even my sisters enjoyed them which is rare because no one in my family eats what I bake, which is kinda confusing because I'm not sure if it's so bad at baking that they avoid it or they don't like eating cakes and stuff which is weird because who doesn't love to eat those deliciousness.

Successful Batch of Cupcakes.

Followed by another batch.

So a few days later I decided to make some macarons , they came out really good as well...

Salted Caramel with Nutella because I was too lazy to actually make the filling.

Fast forward to a few days ago. I decided to make even more macarons. 

ALL OF THEM FUCKING FAILED.

I have no idea what the hell I did wrong because I've been doing the exact same thing as I have done while I was on my macaron making craze, which by the way all came out successfully.

And I am actually really pissed off because all the 4 batches that I made all came out cracked and looked more like the ones I made when I first started.

The problem with my obsession with macarons is that when I start, I won't stop until I find the problem. But I guess one good thing that came out from this barrage of failures after a wave of successes is that now I know I won't want to be involved in culinary in the future.

MORE COOKIES!

Cookie. And Caramel. Without Salt.... yet

I guess my macaron baking obsession that got taken over by my cupcake obsession is quickly being taken over by my obsession with cookies.

The only difference between the cookie and macaron obsession is that those 2 actually come out decent enough.  My cupcakes are always quite sub par which is really depressing because I love cakes, probably why they are always so shit because my standards for cakes are really high. Cakes are like my own children, anything below amazing will be disowned.

My tastebud weren't happy with the Bitter Sweet Chocolates.

Made some browned butter yesterday for the cookies, smelled like Weathers Originals, it was pretty awesome to have my batter smell so good. The only thing that ruined my whole cookie batter was the fact that I threw in Bittersweet Chocolate instead of Semi-Sweet. 

And it's not shitty chocolate, I actually bought good quality Ghirardelli chocolates. Really need to start reading the packaging properly next time.Should have just chopped up my Valrhona Feves and used them instead. 

I also decided to make some salted caramel today because the browning of my butter was so successful.

My first caramel making was a disaster, had to do another one right after the first failure which burnt, made the whole kitchen smell really dangerous, the fumes that I exhaled from the burnt sugar literally made my nose hurt, that's why I avoided making another batch after my second one, which I didn't allow to caramalise enough, but glad to announce this one came out really well.  The cleaning up was troublesome though because it's freaking sticky as fuck, although it smelled amazing, too bad the kitchen didn't smell like caramel afterwards, which was sad because the ants would have been very happy. The maid cleaned up for me so I'm complaining for her sake.

Made Salted Caramel Coffee with Starbucks coffee beans because there's an espresso machine at home. It actually tasted like the Starbucks caramel drink that they sell in 7-11 for the same price as a Child Laborer....which is around 3 peanuts. It was pretty good until I decided to make a second cup, didn't melt the caramel down properly and ended up with a layer of oil on the top of the coffee due to the butter content in the caramel melting first before the whole thing actually fully melted, it was too gross to chuck it down my throat, so I chuck it down the drain because that one doesn't have any feeling.

PS. And that picture I put on Instagram didn't get a single like. So depressing, I'm like an attention seeking whore on Instagram with my pictures. I need like to feel good about myself.

Even more Valrhona

In my quest to get cheap chocolate powder, I decided to venture to Seah Street after dismounting from camp yesterday. I have read online from various blogs and forums that there's this shop at Seah Street that sells really affordable baking ingredients and anything that's affordable is something that should be bought in excess.




True to what I read online, because I wasn't reading all that information from Wikipedia, I managed to get half a kilo worth of Valrhona Cocoa at half the price. Since I was there, I decided why not get some Bittersweet Valrohona Chocolate for baking as well, and then I got a little carried away because I started getting cupcake liners which I didn't need, 2 sticks of butter which I could have gotten at Cold Storage and Red Food Paste which I got because I thought since it was Wilton, why not. Total cost was almost $50. Like 60% of it came from the Valrhona... which I heard a shopper referred to as atas chocolate.



Once I got home I decided to bake some chocolate cookies which I did not manage to snap any pictures of because it's getting a bit out of hand, I mean the last picture I posted on Instagram was this....

I actually get annoyed when people say "Oh Instagram makes a normal photograph look like it's taken by a professional..." and they themselves probably aren't even Instagram users.

Pictures on Instagram are by no means professional looking, but it just annoys me that people brush of really good pictures on Instagram as "mediocre pictures made amazing by Instagram filters..." Are you fucking blind, have you seen like the amount of mediocre photos that remain mediocre even after filtering? Jeez, or maybe that's just photos appearing on my feed... that being said, I have seen some people on my feed who have taken really good pictures... but I'm very stingy with my likes. Probably one reason why most of my likes comes from random users instead of my actual followers who feel obligated to "like" it rather than actually liking it.





My Asus is starting to show some problems. It didn't want to switch on and it didn't show any response even after plugging my charger in, as in the charger icon didn't even light up, and so I did some research on Google and realise my motherboard might by dying soon.


I have no idea if it's dying soon because apparently dying motherboards don't show any signs of dying, it just dies without warning. I mean Google likes to make me think that that itch at my groin area means I have STD  when it's what it really means is to have better hygiene because STD requires a lifestyle I'm lacking.


Well I decided to go down to Asus service center today to get it checked and my stupid laptop decided to work fine again. Asus Service Center is like really really deep in the industrial area of Singapore, it's not convenient to get there at all... even though my Mum had to drive me there. The guy could find any problem because my laptop decided not to have any problem suddenly. So annoying, wasted trip, I was hoping to at least get diagnosed as a safety measure but it will cost me $60 and the tech guy said my computer was working fine, smooth in fact for a laptop that's a year old. And to think my Mum and Sis always blamed me when a virus pops up in the family computer in the past, now my laptop is cleaner that my Mum's netbook.


I had been maligned all those years. Now I can't prove anything because they won't understand anything.... the injustice.



So my laptop is working fine now but I have decided not to plug in my mouse as a precautionary measure, give the laptop some breathing space, don't want to fill up all the USB ports. Probably doesn't affect anything but just in case.


I wish my laptop had feelings, then I will keep surfing Macbook websites and watch Macbook unboxing videos just to scare it. Better work well or I'm going to convert and Windows will blame you for converting a windows user to apple.