2nd Annual Scharffen Berger Bakery Crawl

This year's Scharffen Berger Bakery Crawl took me to 3 new places I had never been before, as well as one repeat. I was also pleased to be a resident of the the city of San Francisco this time, and may have overly enjoyed the fact I could just catch BART to get to and from the tour. I have only recently made the move, so yeah, it was kind of a big deal to me.

This year's theme was cookie sandwiches. One of the SB reps suggested that they thought the cookie sandwich might be the "next big thing" to out stage cupcakes, but there was some debate about whether or not cake pops were going to be. Time will tell! In any case, our tour was dedicated to finding these said cookie sandwiches, which did come a wide variety of shapes, sizes, types, and flavors.

As last time, we started off in the Scharffen Berger's only brick and mortar shop that is in the Ferry Building along the Embarcadero. Conveniently located adjacent to Miette, a delightful bakery with a variety of tasty treats. Our sample was of a chocolate macaron with sumatra coffee ganache filling. I'm not really into coffee, but the flavor was not overwhelming and the cookie was actually not too sweet, which a lot of macarons can be. Cute little packages, too.

We were then corralled out into our trolly car, and headed down into my neighborhood, the Mission. We came to Goody Goody Cream & Sugar, a cafe that has apparently won best chocolate chip cookie in the city award.  Not what we were there to try though. The owner is a long time food industry veteran who had gotten burned out and decided she needed to call the shots, so opened this place up with her family. 

It was a fun spot in a kind of worn down looking block across from this amazing mural.

She created for us the most amazing flavor combo I have ever had in a cookie sandwich. Oil cured cocoa wafers filled with a buttercream with preserved lemon and fresh basil. I know right, what the hell is that going to taste like? It was amazing. I was super skeptical since I've had some pretty overwhelming basil-in-my-dessert experiences, but some how this one worked perfectly. No flavor out-did any other. The cookies were super crisp and nutty, and had a nice salty flavor, and the lemon and the basil worked together being a combination of tart, sweet and savory. I definitely took 2.

We got back in our trolly and headed over the hill to Cole Valley to Ice Cream Bar.

It had a cute interior, with a very retro feel.

The owner served up an amazing platter of ice cream sandwich cookies. It was by far the worst episode of food paparazzi, as we couldn't stop taking pictures of the amazing pile of perfectly stacked sandwiches, but the owner finally forced them upon us since they were in fact filled with now melting ice cream. 

When I first read the flavor on the cards we were given at the start of the tour, I was also skeptical. I am not a big banana-in-desserts fan, and worried that the flavor would overpower the whole piece. Ok, here's the mouthful: Caramelized honey and milk chocolate ice cream sandwiched between 2 banana and cocoa nib cookies (with caramelized cocoa nibs studding the sides, also). 

I ate the entire thing. I mean, it was the size of my fist, let me be clear.

It was so good. The banana flavor was not super strong and the cookie was super soft and puffy. The ice cream was creamy and perfectly sweet, which worked against the crunchy and slightly bitter cocoa nibs that you got a little bit of in every bite. It was just an amazingly well crafted flavor and texture experience.

Trundling back onto our trolly, we landed at our final stop. Here we are parked in front of Macy's Union Square. We were going into the cellar to watch Yigit Pura do a demo on making an amazing custard based ganache (learned something new!) and got to sample one of his fancy cookie sandwich creations as well. He was also extremely high on sugar, which made him all the more entertaining.

We then popped upstairs to the 3rd floor of Macy's to see his brand new pastry shop, Tout Sweet. A very bright, open and welcoming space, with so many tasty treats to tempt you with.

Ok, maybe this was the bigger food paparazzi moment. 

I don't even know what he had us try, but it was delicious. Also noted that he put a nice smooth raspberry jam filling into each lated raspberry. The details!

It was a delightful end to the trip. We got hang out and chat with him about his presentation and his career moves (the shop had literally opened only 3 weeks before, so he was still working on his baby). He also just started offering some savory options, of which I recall sous vide egg sandwiches being on the menu. Must go back!

Another year, another contest - with a bigger prize this time: www.chocolateadventurecontest.com/


Thanks again to Scharffen Berger for hosting such a lovely bakery crawl.

Salted Caramel Macarons

So my friend Carol and I have had 2 macaron bake dates in the last month or so. We both have been experimenting with them on our own, and were getting pretty confident that we had them mastered. So we decided to put our baking caps on and work together on a couple flavors. 

Well nothing did work out quite right that first evening. Every batch we made was gooey, and stuck to the bottom of our pans. Even our fillings were failing that night. We were both really sad after that, thinking we might have to revert back to the unscientific macaron wives' tales to have success. After a few days, Carol figured out that it was actually her oven that was off by about 50˚.  What a relief! Maybe we weren't failures after all! 

But we had to be sure, so we set up another bake date to try again. We definitely did better that time, after Carol got a thermometer for in her oven to make sure it was at the right setting. We made chocolate macarons sprinkled with smoked sea salt and filled with salted caramel buttercream. Those came out great. We also made chai spiced ones, but apparently the addition of the chai powder to the macaron shells was a bad combo, as they did not rise or bake well (we suspect the non dairy creamer in the powder might have been the culprit, as just adding the spices of chai would have probably been fine). 

What's even better is that Carol posted the recipe online already, so all I need to do is link to it! Wee. She took an awesome photo too. As well, we tried to simply whip the caramel so it had more body and could stand alone as the macaron filling, but it was still too thin, so decided to do buttercream instead. Can't go wrong with macarons with buttercream, really. Looked pretty when we were whipping the caramel though. 

As well, she found a site that actually detailed more scientific reasoning for all of the wacky wives' tale rumors we'd been reading up on, so were relieved that some of the tricks actually had good reasons behind them. If you're into macaron baking, I recommend checking it out just so you know the why's of how to do things. 

French Macarons

I don't really know enough about French or language to know who is right and who is wrong about how to spell macarons, I just know that these don't have coconut in them, so think it's safer to drop the second "o" and not call them "macaroons." I follow David Lebovitz's lead on this one, anyhow.

What I do know is that these are delicious, and I am still figuring out how to make them. This is the first time I've posted my efforts, as nothing before has seemed either good enough or reproducible enough to post about. But this is the 2nd time I've made this and they've worked out, so I think I'm getting the hang of it.

See, I don't have a kitchen scale, and so many of these French macaron recipes only give you weight measurements (well, cuz they're more accurate, can't blame them for that), but I don't have a scale. So, after many a failed attempt, I finally found a measuring cup based recipe that I had decent results with, minding that I didn't use the pre-ground almond flour they sell at Trader Joe's, and instead, grind the almonds up myself with my food processor, then sift out the largest chunks. While adding another step, and another round of dishes, this seems to have done the trick.

Now, I have to say, they are still not perfect. I expect a certain amount of airy nothingness in the middle of my macaron, and a perfect foot (the sort of crumbly looking side of the cookie), which still isn't consistent across all cookies in even the same batch. I think these ones came out just a little too gooey/sticky in the middle, even though I think the tops domed quite perfectly. So many variables!

I will muse for a second on how ridiculous some of the wives tales that surround making macarons have become. Yes, these are some tricky pastries, but I feel like some bakers swear by witch craft and superstitions to get their macarons just right. "Fold in almond flour no more than 20 strokes!" or "leave out on parchment paper 2 hours before baking" and "dance around the smallest one in a counter-clockwise direction 6 times for best results." Ok, I exaggerate. But for any bakers out there who have also tried to master these beauties, and try and get them perfect, mind you, there has got to be some science to it that could make them universally approachable. Then again, maybe they're just meant to be fickle.

If you like macarons, and have a kitchen scale, I highly recommend checking out my friend Risa's blog, Baked Perfection, as she is always coming up with some special new macaron flavor combo. They all look very delicious!