Ithaca Falls

Here are some pictures I took today at Ithaca Falls.  

 

Cake and Macarons

Hi y'all, I'm a little late with this but I wanted to share my awesome birthday baking project.  I turned 30 (!!!) last weekend and, after a birthday week filled with wonderful celebrations with friends, I celebrated the actual day with my family in Cumberland.  Kaitlyn came over and we baked my birthday cake and a new confection, macarons.  We used Martha's recipe for both the macarons and the filling.  For those who don't know, French macarons are basically little meringue cookie sandwiches with a sweet filling, which can be flavored in pretty much any way you like.  I've seen a lot of macarons with fruit fillings, but for our first time out I wanted to keep it simple, so we made a basic buttery meringuey filling.  Next time I want to try chocolate.

The macaron batter is basically made from meringue, powdered sugar, and ground almonds.  The recipe called for blanched almonds but we couldn't find any, so ours had bits of peel in them.  Fortunately, this didn't affect the taste.

 

 

Almond/powdered sugar mixture ready to be sifted

 

 

Beating the egg whites

 Dry and wet ingredients incorporated and colored pink (of course!)

Piping the batter in little circles. 

 Baking in the oven with the door ajar.

Out of the oven and cooling!  Here, you can see the little specks of almond peel.

 Heating up egg whites for the filling.

 The filling was made basically by putting a ton of butter into warm meringue, sweetened with confectioner's sugar.  Ah-maz-ing.

All done!  Our pretty little pink macarons.

Well, it wouldn't be a birthday without a birthday cake.  Of course we used the Magnolia recipe; there is none better in my book.  We modified it a bit--since we had so much of the macaron filling left over, Kaitlyn had the idea to use it between the cake layers.  This idea turned out to be pure genius.  So delicious!  

Pink birthday cake with 30 CANDLES!!!

Decoration by Kaitlyn.

Oh, what a pretty table setting for my family birthday party.

My beautiful cake and sweet macarons awaiting consumption.

What better use for a crystal bowl?

My mom picked out the tres chic candles. :)

Oh yes, I had a blue birthday cake with pink frosting.

 Yum.

 Yum!!!

 Guess who else thought it was yummy?  Zorro.  My parents' dog.  I guess when you leave a cake at dog-level you reap what you sow.  I gave that piece to my dad.  (With the dog-licked part cut off, of course!)