22nd Birthday Treats + Baking French Macaroons

I spent my actual birthday in the workroom at school-- 17 hours of sewing, pattern making and all around fun. There was a slight break taken however, when Angy and Joanne surprised me with this amazing brownie tower cake topped off with a raspberry cheesecake and served with hazelnut coffee from our home away from home, Brooklyn Bagel.

(If you live in NYC and are in the Chelsea area, go there immediately. I eat like 2 meals a day there and have converted all my friends to serious addicts.) Their brownies are possibly the best i've ever had. (Sorry Mom.)

On Monday night after i'd finished all my classes for the semester, my korean bffls took me to Mad for Chicken in K-town for a lovely b-day celebration feast of fried chicken and amazing sushi. If you haven't had korean fried chicken-- get to it. Soo delicious. Served with carrots, celery and, my favorite, (korean?) radishes. The sauce is half soy garlic and half extra extra spicy. It's hot.

I have officially mastered eating drumsticks and wings entirely with chopsticks. I am not kidding.

Thennn, upon returning to Texas, my mom cooked up a legit feast for the fam + Katie, Amanda, Samantha, Marcus and Carrie. The meal consisted of my favorite salad, steak au poivre, pomme frites, and this amazinggg pumpkin tart.

I didn't get any pictures of the meal because I was too busy snarfing it down. I did however, pause for long enough to document this magazine cover worthy dessert. It was soo amazing. I promise to add the recipe asap.

For Christmas Day, I made some French Macaroons. I had been wanting to make these for a while, because they look so good. They were definitely a little tricky to make, mostly because they are very fragile, but they turned out perfectly and were really, really tasty. I didn't even put any flavoring in, so mine just had the traditional almond flavor and then the dark chocolate filling. So good. Now that I have a food processor of my own, I will be able to make these often.

My dad doing his best French face...

macaroon recipe

As you can see, a lovely and sweet 22nd birthday.

PIE POPS!!

So I think I can safely say, this was the most excited I have been about a post so far. Last week was most definitely the most insane week i've had at school so far this semester, and after 5 days of literally no sleep and consuming nothing but bagels, soup, brownies and coffeecoffeecoffee I passed out for 10 hours and woke up ready to bake. A while back I saw an entry on Pie Pops! one of my most favorite blogs that I just discovered, Luxirare, and I was immediately determined to recreate them. However, while Luxirare's looked sooo amazing (no really, check it out here)they used store bought pie crusts and only fruit, corn starch and sugar as a filling. So, while they certainly photographed waaay better than anything I would be making, they didn't sound that appetizing.

This project actually takes quite a bit of brainstorming, but luckily my friend Rachel signed up to help since I was still slightly brain-impaired from the activities of the week. Basically, you have to use a pie filling that a. bakes in the crust, and b. isn't too runny or lumpy. Immediately I thought of pumpkin pie (duh) and perused through epicurious.com for a new recipe since I always like to try a different pumpkin pie recipe. I was clearly feeling overambitious/ hungry because I also decided on a chocolate fudge pie recipe (which was reportedly Marilyn Monroe's fave pie recipe...)

about to go into the oven. shiny and pretty after an egg white wash on top.

these first ones weren't too pretty, but they tasted so, so good! (Marilyn knows good pie!)

see all those flakey layers?! homemade crust!!

Tae approved.

Sookhyun and Tae ate like 6 each.

I wish I had taken more pictures of the actual process, but

since you only need a pretty small spoonful of batter per pop, I have about 5 tons of filling leftover and am going to make some more this week, so I will document and update...

So the recipes I used were: Miss Milton's Lovely Fudge Pie & Pumpkin Pie

I didn't make any changes to the chocolate pie at all, and it was the perfect consistency. The pumpkin pie however, did turn out to be a little too liquidy, so I baked it in the over for about 45 minutes at 325 degrees to kind of set it up. It worked perfectly. The pie crust recipe is my moms: 2 cups flour, 1/2 cup canola oil, 1/4 cup icy cold milk. One pie crust recipe makes about 10 pops. In one night I made 6 pie crust recipes. That's a lot of rolling. They only need to bake about 10 minutes!

These would be really fun to serve at a party with a big bowl of whipped cream. Definitely a possibility for my upcoming Thanksgiving get-together...

More coming soon!