Melting macarons

I have been doing a fairly intensive amount of baking recently with varying degrees of success. It is a bit scary how easily things can go wrong with patisserie and it takes quite a lot of courage to carry on in the knowledge that at any second it's probably all going to go a bit out of control. I seem to veer from one near catastrophe to the next in the kitchen. This evening at my birthday party the delicate little macarons I worked so hard to make were sitting prettily on their glass plate - the next thing I knew they had turned into some sort of molten creation that we needed spoons to dig into. It still tasted scrummy it's just that it looked a bit weird and rather less elegant. Well as the French say Tant pis..

The other calamity was the pastry creme for my strawberry tart which turned into scrambled egg as I was adding the egg mixture to the simmering milk. I managed to salvage it by hastily transferring it all back into the KitchenAid mixer. Thank God for that piece of machinery. It's worth every penny of the investment as it sorts out most of my messes. In the end I was very happy with the result even if the tart went the same way as the macarons and turned into an aesthetic slop. Notice that I only place images of these delicacies on this page before they started to slide of the plate... the rest I leave to your imagination.

I don't really mind these mishaps as I quite enjoy the voyage of discovery and I learn something from each new disaster. I'm beginning to gain a whole new respect for the art of patisserie. It's a steep learning curve but one that I'm happy to pursue because it seems to give a lot of pleasure to everyone and that's a good thing in life.