Pâte à Chaux
Pâte à Chaux is a very unique form to make dough and it gets very particular results. We heat our liquids to a boil and mix the flour right after. Cooking has already started... it is steam that do most of the leavening and when we add the eggs in the mixer we do it one by one slowly to get the proper emulsion. In Pâte à Chaux recipes you will usually use less eggs than prescribe, so really, crack them one by one as needed. The dough will be piped to the desired format and with the according tip to what you are doing, in our cases here we used the round tip. Do you want to know how we did the cute little mouse? Follow us on instagram @chefvoliv and send us a message.
Only with a paper piping bag with a very fine tip allows us to do the details on the Swan and the Mouse with their eyes as can be seen in the pictures 3,4 and 5 below. This same technique can be used to make details in other pastry items, in these we used chocolate ganache to make our little friends come to life.
Macaron is a traditional desert from France and a particularly expensive one. It takes some time to make and it uses plenty of Almond paste (or Almond flower as we used) and that makes your unit price to be higher than regular items with just wheat flour.
We used some red coloring in the mixing process and got this "orange" look in ours above. Typically, the cookie itself varies in coloring but not in taste and the different tastes come from the filling. In this case we made a Chocolate Ganache that we used to fill delicately with a paper piping bag. So what you want is to somewhat match the coloring you are using for your batch with your filling, let's say, yellow will be passion fruit, lighter green can be pistachio, bright red for strawberries, and so on... check out some of the steps of our Macaron on the pictures 6, 7 and 8 above.