A few weeks ago, we were writing about this eBook we found on Smashwords that inspired us to start up a new blog category just so we can share interesting eBook finds. This latest entry, we’re adding our very first eBook recommendation: Clockwise by Elle Strauss!

    The book has a very common theme: you’ve got this geeky girl, at the bottom of the social ladder admiring her high school crush who happens to be at the top of the social ladder and a jock. She’s smart, frizzy-haired, has no boyfriend and likes to watch this crush from the sidelines of the football field. He’s hot, he’s athletic and has a hot girlfriend. It all sounds pretty cliché, but what makes Clockwise that much different to the typical is it adds time travel to the mix.

    Casey Donovan, the geeky girl at school, also has the ability to travel back to the eighteenth century. Without notice, she’ll leave her present time in the 21st century back to the 18th century. There, she is resourceful and brave, learning to survive in an era that lacks all the comforts of her present time. Clockwise doesn’t only focus around the relationship between Casey and Nate (which develops when she accidentally brings him back in time with her) the story also features her family’s past, the racism that is rife in the era and the civil war that is transpiring. (The civil war looks to be the main focus in the next book, which we hope to get into reading when we get onto buying it.) There is a lot more happening than a relationship between opposites that makes the story move quickly: there is time travel, American history, villains, a civil war and a secondary focus on her troubled younger brother.

    On television we like to watch science fiction and action. With books, we like to read young adult fiction and period fiction, like Jane Eyre. Clockwise by Elle Strauss has a mixture of all the genres we love to watch and read. This is why we enjoyed this book so much. If you, too, like the sound of this combination, give it a go! If this combination isn’t your usual kind, we highly recommend you read it for the sake of curiosity in how all of this comes together.

Clockwise by Elle Strauss can be found on Smashwords.

Happy reading!
- Julia and Tania. : o) : o).

Over the weekend, we were looking to find a few good indie eBooks to read. We browsed through places like Amazon, iBookstore and Smashwords. It’s not an easy task we realise.

    There have been previous occasions we went through these sites looking for an eBook to read; every time we came out empty-handed. We go in, click a few genres and then scroll through the list; we scan the countless summaries then click out. It wasn’t that there weren’t good eBooks on offer; it was that there were too many and we found scanning through all those summaries (and occasionally the first few pages of the eBooks) a little too overwhelming.

    This time round, it was almost the same outcome; but then this book at the top of the list in the Young Adult section on Smashwords caught the attention. The summary looked good, the cover looked good and the first few pages sounded good, too; so it was downloaded and read. Two days later, the book was finished. (Reading would have been faster had there not been a need to do other things.)

    If there had been any faith lost in finding good reads on the aforementioned sites before, all faith is now restored after this find. So much was restored that it has inspired us to start up a new blog category to talk about our eBook finds. We decided that every eBook we like, we will feature it as a part of the blog category called ‘Julia & Tania’s eBook Picks‘.

    Most of the eBooks will probably be in the genres of Young Adult, Action/Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Period fiction, Romance and maybe Fantasy, too. These are the genres we like most. We’re not fans of Horror; nor are we fans of Thriller so this collection will probably not include those. We also plan to read mostly indie, self-published eBooks; so you’ll probably see a lot of indie authors feature here—that is unless they become so popular that the title ‘indie author’ no longer suits them! : o) : o). Here’s hoping we play a part in promoting them towards such a path!

    Well, that’s all for now. Expect to see us post our first recommendation in the coming weeks!

Till next time!
Julia and Tania.

    The Italian Meringue method of making macarons has its perks, but we are definitely fans of the French Meringue method of making macarons because of its relatively less complicated method. However, as the French meringue and Italian meringue differs, there are good and bad points in each method and the resulting look of the macarons.

Method

    The Italian Meringue requires an extra step of the sugar syrup (made with just sugar and water) to which needs to reach a certain temperature and be timed well with the whipping egg whites. The Italian meringue requires good time management. Because of this, you will either need a second person to help or a stand mixer so that you can make the sugar syrup and whip the egg whites at the same time. Otherwise, it’d be quite a juggling act trying to do both the sugar syrup and whipping the egg whites at the same time with a hand mixer. This extra step of making the sugar syrup makes the process more complicated.

The French Meringue method does not require the timing that is required for the Italian Meringue and it doesn’t require the extra step of making the sugar syrup. It only uses the four main ingredients: egg whites, ground almonds, caster sugar and icing sugar. The process is relatively easier.

Stability

The Italian Meringue produces a more stable meringue and for this reason it is not as easily to mess up or affected by environmental factors. The French meringue method is very sensitive to environmental factors and poor technique.

Skill

Though the process involved in the Italian Meringue method is comparatively more complicated than the French Meringue method, the required skill/technique and understanding of the importance of good technique and other factors that affect macaron making is much higher for making macarons using the French meringue. The more stable meringue of the Italian Meringue allows room for error, while there is very little room for error with the more unstable French meringue.

Appearance

Some have said that the Italian Meringue produces better looking macarons than ones made with the French Meringue, but we say that you can produce some good-looking macarons with the French Meringue, too. Below are some examples of macarons we have made using the French Meringue and the Italian Meringue. The recipes we chose were randomly chosen online that have been found to work very well by others.

Above: Another example of macarons using the French Meringue method. Notice how the feet can be straight up and down with the French Meringue method also? It is of course still ruffled.

The images show that you can produce pretty good-looking macarons with both methods. It’s just easier to produce good-looking macarons consistently with the Italian Meringue method and that’s because of the higher stabililty of the Italian meringue. With the French Meringue method, you will more likely to fail because of the relatively more unstable nature of the French meringue.

Below, we compare some similarities and differences between the two methods:

Texture

The Italian Meringue method produces fuller, more compact interiors than the French Meringue. The compactness of the Italian meringue macaron interiors means they aren’t as light and airy or melt-in-the-mouth as macarons made with the French Meringue.

Vibrancy

The colors of the shells are much more vibrant in the Italian Meringue macarons.

Shell Thickness

The Italian meringue has a relatively thicker shell, but only slightly and sometimes the difference is unnoticeable. We’ve noticed that with macarons using the French meringue method, the shell can get similar to a sheet of ice. When bitten into, it has a very delicate crunch and shatters into very tiny pieces—so delicate and thin that the tiny broken pieces angle into the filling, but not pierce into it. We’ve not come across an Italian Meringue macaron with a shell as delicate.

Feet

The feet is straighter and inline with the shell with macarons made with the Italian meringue (example image can be found above under Macarons – Italian Meringue Method). It is possible to get the straight-up-and-down feet in the French meringue macarons but that requires all factors that affect successful macaron making to be in balance—technique, environmental factors and oven (in depth discussion of all these can be found in our eBook, “Making Macarons: What Recipes Don’t Tell You”).

Success Rate

There is less disappointment of failure with the Italian Meringue method as it allows more room for error. The examples of the Italian Meringue macarons we’ve shown (all the Italian Meringue macaron images above) are from our second attempt of Italian Meringue macarons. Our first attempt were produced under high humidity and had idle whipped up egg whites sitting and waiting ready for around a minute for the sugar syrup to reach the correct temperature. It was not perfect, but good:

Above: Full interior, however has a thicker shell than what’s called perfect.

Above: some collapsed interiors. This image shows a large chunk of shell piercing into the filling and demonstrates what a shell—Italian meringue or French meringue alike—should not be.

This shows how slight errors won’t ruin a batch with the Italian Meringue method. The French Meringue method will not allow for error as even slight errors will show up very visibly in the macarons—collapsed interiors/hollowness, weak shells, splattered feet or even no feet and cracked shells.

Final Words
The French Meringue method of making macarons requires less fuss and we choose it because of that reason. Not only that, but the French meringue macarons, in our opinion tastes better simply because it does produce a more lighter and airier macaron with a more delicate shell.

    If we were to advise which method to use for beginner macaron makers, we would suggest the Italian Meringue method because of the stability of the meringue that the method produces. That extra stability created from the extra step of the sugar syrup allows much more room for errors, so the extra step of getting the sugar syrup to the exact temperature and timing it perfectly with the whipping egg whites is worth it if it means that you get macarons coming out of the oven looking like macarons. Getting a candy thermometer to make sure the sugar syrup reaches to the correct temperature and timing it with the egg whites is an easier thing to learn than understanding and balancing all the factors that affect macarons, required to produce perfect macarons using the French Meringue method.

Make perfect macarons with our new eBook, Making Macarons: What Recipes Don’t Tell You

    We found no trouble picking up the Italian meringue method of making macarons after learning how to make macarons using the French meringue method. We don’t think the transition would have been so easy if we started out making macarons using the Italian Meringue method. The constant failure with the French meringue method would have had us give up and revert back to using the more stable and less disappointing method that is the Italian Meringue method of making macarons.

    This concludes our “Macarons: Quest for Perfection” blog series. Please check out our eBook on macaron making, “Making Macarons: What Recipes Don’t Tell You”. It is a book discussing the factors that affect macarons and provides tips and recommendations as well as a troubleshoot guide. Purchase a copy of this eBook and arm yourself with the knowledge and produce perfect macarons consistently. Or, maybe you have been following our macaron blog series and want to show your appreciation by either purchasing a copy or help us spread the word about our eBook to other macaron makers having trouble turning out perfect macarons. Direct them to our eBook information page: http://www.juliaandtania.com/publications/mmwrdty/.

That’s a wrap!

Julia and Tania. : o) : o).

See our other posts in Macarons, Quest for Perfection blog series:

“[N]obody thought [Jeremy] Lin could make it in the NBA. He was too short and too weak, with a mediocre jump shot.” – WIRED

We are not basketball fans—though, on occasions, we’ll watch a game or two when there is nothing else on TV—but this story about Jeremy Lin being picked to get some game time with the New York Knicks caught our attention. We love this story as well as have some dislike for it. We love that it features a guy who breaks steoreotypes. He’s academically successful and he’s a basketball hero; and he proves being smart and being able to play professional basketball don’t have to be mutually exclusive. And despite not fitting the image of what coaches, scouts and whoever else thought, is a basketball-star-in-the-making, he manages to prove to them that he didn’t have to fit this mold of theirs to become the missing ingredient to posting a winning streak.

    Now, the part of the story we don’t like: it took a time of poor team performance and a last-resort decision to get him some game time. How often does this happen, where just because people didn’t fit the profile or did things not quite to what is the standard of doing things that they were turned away and never given a chance to prove themselves? A lot. It happens during sports team try-outs, school applications, job interviews… just basically anywhere where you’re being judged whether you’re the right person for something.

    Sometimes, the vetting process that’s in place doesn’t work. We don’t know all that much about how prospective basketball players are found, so we’ll use candidate selection for jobs instead.The words in the resumes, the words that come out of a person’s mouth may look and sound good and on point (or not good and off-point as the case may be); but they don’t always reflect the true value of the person. Sometimes, what it takes is being given a chance to show their skills and talent on the job, in-field, over a reasonable period of development time that the person’s true worth is finally grasped.

    It was just fortunate that the New York Knicks suffered a loss to Boston Celtics (source: Wikipedia). Otherwise, they would have not discovered Jeremy Lin, someone that didn’t meet selectors’ standards, but was more than capable and very worthy of a starting member, as he meant the difference between a struggling team and being back on the winning side. To find his true worth, they just needed to give him real chance to see him in action and prove himself.

    Best Buy is this retailer in the United States that specialise in electronics. They also sell US iTunes cards/codes to international customers. You can be from New Zealand, Australia, the UK—almost anywhere in the world and buy the US iTunes codes off their site with your non-US credit card. The best part is they don’t add a service charge like on Ebay and other online sites that sell the codes. The amount on the iTunes cards is the amount you pay for and get in credit. Sometimes they’ll even have discounted prices on iTunes cards. A few weeks ago, they were selling a $100 and $50 US iTunes card for US$80 and US$40, respectively. So, not only do you not have to pay a service charge, you get extra credit on your account!

    When you add the US iTunes card to your cart, make sure you choose the right one. They sell both the card version and the code version. The code version will have ‘Digital Delivery’ in brackets next to the name of the card (i.e. Apple® – iTunes $50 Code (Digital Delivery)). This is the one that will get you issued a US iTunes code through email. Once you have selected the card(s) you’d like to purchase, make sure you fill in the address as stated in their International Orders page. You’ll be asked to fill out a US address and a US phone number that matches your credit card. For the address, fill in the address they provide you. For the phone number, you can provide any number you have (the phone number doesn’t have to match your credit card it seems)

    There you have it. You can now buy US iTunes cards/codes abroad. Pretty handy if you’ve got a US iTunes account and don’t want to trouble your US friends anymore or you’ve moved to another country from the US and don’t own a US credit card anymore.

Make perfect macarons with our new book, Making Macarons: What Recipes Don’t Tell You

We have read that one of the worst things that can happen to pastry chefs is when they move to a new kitchen and they have to work with a new oven (‘new’ referring to ‘different’ as opposed to the age of the oven). Despite using the same recipe, using the same temperature setting and baking time that have worked for their previous oven, they find the recipe and its settings do not work for the oven in their new kitchen. They find that they have to learn the oven and see what works and what doesn’t temperature-wise, which consequently means figuring out the baking time as well.

    When working with a macaron recipe, the experience is not all that dissimilar. Instead of you testing the recipe on different ovens, the recipe moves around to various ovens and is tested when each of us use them on each of our ovens. When this recipe is used in various kitchens, you may find (through reading or hearing others’ outcome) that for some people the temperature setting and baking time stated in the recipe works for them, but for you it’s a disaster. This is because every oven is different. Different types exist as well as different models. Variations in design, technology and additional features in the ovens influence the optimal temperature, baking time and oven set-up.

    To figure out what the optimal temperature is for your oven, we recommend obtaining an oven thermometer to start off. You want to make sure your oven temperature is accurate and that there isn’t too much variance in temperature during baking: macarons are sensitive to temperature and you want your oven temperature to be as accurate as possible. (If you find that the reading of your oven temperature is inaccurate, you will need to have it looked at and recalibrated.) Once this is taken care of then you can begin testing your oven for the right temperature.

    When testing temperatures, we suggest sending in partial batches. Don’t send in the full batch. Send in little batches at a time. Pipe your batter into groups of two or three and send them in separately: you will waste less and have more to test this way.

    The main signs of too high oven temperature are browning, cracking and the collapse of the meringue. Sticky bottoms and pooling of the meringue are signs the temperature is too low. Uneven baking—that is, macaron shells on one side browns more than the other side—is the cause of uneven heat distribution. In the latter case you will need to make alterations to oven set-up and (say) rotate the baking sheet midway through baking.

    If you find that no matter what temperature or adjustments you make you still get less than perfect macarons, it may be that the problems aren’t oven-related. It may very well be technique and drying related.

    When you finally have a temperature that you believe works for your macarons and your oven, it’s time to figure out for how long. Use the recipe’s temperature and baking time as a guide. If you have set your temperature lower that its recommendation, bake the macarons longer, extend it for a minute at a time, making sure macarons aren’t over-baked. Similarly, if your temperature needs to be higher than the recipe’s recommendation, bake the macarons less.

Four batches of French meringue macarons: apricot (top-left), rose (top-right), vanilla (bottom-left) and dutch-process cocoa (bottom-right).

    There have been information suggesting baking macarons in convection ovens with the fan on and missing a bottom bake element produces not so great macarons, we can attest that this is not true. Our oven is a fan-forced convection oven with no option to turn off the fan, no bottom element, prone to hotspots and the temperature can sway as much as 5°C during baking. Our baking sheet occasionally pops during baking, too, causing one corner to be at a 20° angle. Still, we manage to produce full batches of macarons with glossy shells, ruffled feet and full interiors. Failed macarons are not the result of having the wrong kind of oven. To produce great macarons, you must first get your technique right and then dry your macarons then study your oven. Do the aforementioned correctly, and macaron shells will materialise. Don’t give up. You can bake macarons in any oven!

    This concludes the series on Macarons, Quest for Perfection—at least for the time being. We may add a blog to the series in the future relating to macarons using the Italian Meringue. Just before we sign off from this blog series, though, we would like to do a bit of self-promotion for our new eBook we published on macarons, which covers much more information than we’ve done in this blog series and is available for purchase.

French meringue macarons!

Making Macarons: What Recipes Don’t Tell You [EBOOK]

    In our Making Macarons: What Recipes Don’t Tell You eBook, you can find out more factors that affect the success of macarons and new information which has not been covered in this blog series. We cover not only what factors affects turning out perfect batches of macarons, but also how they affect them. We provide detailed information about the techniques used, the ideal conditions for baking macarons—humidity levels and temperatures—and more information about baking macarons in ovens and our oven settings and set-up. The book also includes a troubleshoot section for macarons with colour photos, discussing the many problems macarons encounter, their cause(s) and the solution(s) to the problem.

    We hope you have time to traverse over to our page on our Making Macarons: What Recipes Don’t Tell You eBook. If you go as far as purchasing a copy, we will be forever grateful for your purchase and support! The price of our book is around the price of two macarons. Imagine how many you could turn out. You’ll never have to spend a dime on buying macarons again once you start turning out batches and batches of beautiful macarons shells yourself after reading this eBook of ours. ; oP ; oP.

Happy macaron baking!
- Julia and Tania. : o) : o).

See our other posts in Macarons, Quest for Perfection blog series:

Above: French meringue rose and vanilla macarons. In the rose-flavoured batch, we had accidentally pierced through the skin, but feet still developed; good technique and correct drying time allows feet to form.

The next topic in “Macarons, Quest for Perfection” is Drying Time. When it comes to resting and drying the macarons, there is a lot of disagreement and confusing information out there. Do we dry them for twenty minutes, thirty minutes, or an hour? Do macarons even need to be rested and dried? There are people out there who stand by the claim that macarons can be piped and put straight into the oven. Through many, many wasted batches of macarons, trying out these varying drying periods—or lack there of—we can say that not only must macaron shells be rested and dried, but they must be dried thoroughly.

Make perfect macarons with our new eBook, Making Macarons: What Recipes Don’t Tell You

    The macaron’s signature foot is formed through having a strong skin form on its surface. This skin must dry to a point where they are dry to the touch, be able to glide a finger on the surface of the shell. This will help them withstand the oven and enable lifting of the shell and reveal the batter underneath, creating feet. Not letting them dry or rushing this step will mean cracks on the shells and lack of feet or uneven feet.

    The time it takes for macarons shells to develop this skin will depend on your baking environment. How warm and how humid it is in your baking environment (not outside!) will affect the length of time your macaron shells will dry. If your environment is warm and relatively dry, the time it will need to sit out will be shorter. If it is cold and the air is damp (i.e. high humidity) then your macarons will need to sit out for longer. Do not be surprised if your macarons need to rest/dry for triple the time recommended by some recipes, especially if the recipe calls for a short 20 or 30 minutes: even under the best baking environments, macarons don’t dry in such a short drying period.

    We have never had any success making a batch of macarons drying for such a short period of time. Others, however, have. Those who have managed to make macarons with little to no drying time, we can only presume that they are either using the Italian Meringue as the base, their oven has some special feature we’re not aware of that allows drying of the shell, or the specific combination of their ingredients allow for no drying time. Curious to see if it was the Italian Meringue or the combination of ingredients that permitted macarons to not need any drying time, we went in search of, firstly, a recipe using the French Meringue that maintains the “no drying needed” stance, then we searched for a recipe using the Italian Meringue.

    With the recipe that used the French Meringue and no drying time, there were a number of differences from the recipe we normally used. In terms of the ingredients list, there was the addition of salt. (In a basic macaron recipe, it consists of only egg whites, ground almonds, icing sugar and caster sugar). It asked for egg whites from any type of egg as opposed to the commonly asked, ‘aged egg whites’ and they must be whipped to a very stiff meringue. In regards to proportions, there was slightly less sugar in the meringue and less ground almonds to one egg white.

    A technique it employed that we normally didn’t employ is the rapping of the trays several times. After piping, it asks us to rap it hard on the countertop so that air bubbles are rid of and do not rise to the top during baking and cause cracks. We’ve never had to rap our baking sheets; we only give light taps under the baking sheet. If you have the perfect batter consistency, light taps is all you need—if at all. And we’ve never found air bubbles on the surface to be the cause of cracks: if macarons are left to dry, air bubbles that surface during the drying process will not cause major aesthetic problems to your macaron shells. So, the fact that this recipe was asking us to basically slam the sheet down onto the table for that reason was quite surprising to us.

    The last difference, it instructs us to put it straight into the oven at 300°F (148.9°C) and bake for around 18 minutes.

    The result was not good, to say the least. The shells were fine up until the five-minute mark. Thereafter, they began to strain against the oven heat. They puffed up and out, they became porous, fissures appeared. There was no foot of any kind on any of them. By the ten-minute mark, we decided to switch our oven off. They had turned out as we had expected them to. They progressed exactly like our very first batch of macarons when we made the mistake of drying them not long enough. So, there was no point in continuing to waste electricity on this batch.

    Predicting that the batch would go the way of feetless and porous macaron shells, we had piped three macaron shells from the same batter on another baking tray to test how they’d perform if we dried them. We didn’t dry them till they were touch-dry, though; we only dried them to the point where we could touch the rim and no batter stuck to the finger. We figured a short drying time of about 30 minutes should be more than enough drying time for a recipe not asking for any drying time. And the result was that there was improvement: there were feet this time, but the shells did crack. Nevertheless, they did look like macaron shells.

    We moved onto testing our next theory about macarons using the Italian Meringue base as not needing drying time. We found a recipe and tried not drying them. We can say they went the same way as the previous recipe that didn’t call for a drying period.

    From these two failed batches and semi-success with the one we dried for a short period, we conclude macarons do need to dry. Having made many successful batches before, we know our failures were not due to poor technique: we know how to spot the perfect batter consistency. We know it wasn’t the weighing of ingredients since we use a digital scale and made sure it is accurately calibrated. The only other variable we may need to consider is our oven. The writer of the recipe did not give information on the oven they use, how it operates, or if temperature was kept consistent throughout the baking time. We also can’t help to wonder if there is an oven that has some special feature or operates in a way that allows skin to form on the shells whilst they baked—because—skin absolutely needs to be there in order for lifting to occur so feet forms. Maybe the oven was the difference between us succeeding with their recipe and failing.

    Whether the oven played a part or not, to reduce the undesirable result of macaron shells expand up and outwards, crack and remain feetless, make sure you dry the macarons. This step is time-consuming, but this step is necessary. Dry them thoroughly, until it is touch-dry and your finger can glide right across the surface of the shells. This will give the macaron shells a good chance of developing feet and keep the shells from cracking under the oven heat.

Macaron failures: macarons with too little drying time results in cracks.

See our other posts in Macarons, Quest for Perfection blog series:

Living in a relatively small country, not everything we’re looking for is available here. There was a time when we really wanted to purchase some Auralex foam for some audio recording we were doing. We searched online and went to a lot of physical stores. No success. More recently we’ve been searching for specialty ingredients and equipment for some Christmas baking. After a long search and a lot of leg work, we did manage to find the ingredients and equipment we were after. How did we find them? Through the business’ websites.

    Out of all the businesses that we think should have websites, it should be those that sell specialty goods. There is a benefit to having a website. So many people like us do their searches online first before heading out to the store. Having a website for the unique product range would certainly bring in more customers. This unique range would also be enough to send the store to the top of search engine ranking, which mean less need to pay for advertising for top spot. After that, it’s pretty much be a done deal between customer and business (it would have been what would’ve happened had we found a local online or physical store that sold Auralex foam).

    Specialty stores don’t have to have an online store, just a well laid out website to showcase the specialty products they sell. Provide a location and people like us will visit the place. We understand building and maintaining a website can be expensive. So, it doesn’t have to be one that requires a paid webhost, designers and coders. A free hosted blog on the product range from a place like WordPress would be good alternative.

    A website, an online presence would go a long way into making the discovery a lot easier. We had believed that very little in the way of specialty goods was available in New Zealand. But now, having had some success in finding them, we think it’s not that no specialty goods are available in New Zealand, it’s that they’re not visible enough to be discovered.

P.S. Happy New Year! May 2012 bring lots of joy and prosperity!

WEBSITES OF INTEREST:

Consumer Rankings

In case there is anyone looking to start up a website, at Consumer Rankings, they’ve published the 10 most popular web hosting companies (all of them overseas). We hear that Bluehost is a good web host to go with, and judging by their ranking, a lot of people agree with that, too.

WordPress

    Another option is to have a hosted blog from WordPress. This is not just a site providing blogs. There are full functioning sites with search, categorisation, social media integration and shopping carts in WordPress. With their large database of themes, there’s sure to be a design that matches the look and feel of anyone looking to promote their business more, too. There are plenty of plugins available to perform all kinds of functions, taking the out the need to write or install complicated code. The ease and flexibility of WordPress sites makes setting up an online presence a breeze.

Merry Christmas, everyone!
- Julia and Tania. : o) : o).

1. Wacom Bamboo Paper
This is a notebook you can use to scribble down your notes, lists, diagrams and drawings. When you don’t feel like typing, you can use your finger or iPad stylus to write or draw. The pages in the notebook comes in blank, lined or grid—perfect for all kinds of note keeping: whether it be an idea, a shopping list, or graph at a math lecture. We like the convenience of this app. Often, during times of idleness, ideas pop in; it is usually when there is no pen or paper in sight. With this iPad app, story and design ideas can be jotted down or drawn without the need to search out for a pen, paper or turn on the light. So handy!

2. Pages
Pages on the iPad is a fantastic application for creating documents on the go. This application isn’t as feature-filled as the program we’re used to using—Microsoft Word—but it has enough features to get a story, article, letter or CV typed up. With this app, we can have all the common formatting applied to the text (bolds, alignments, indenting, columns and line height) to produce a very good looking, well-presented document. When everything is done, it can be printed via an AirPrint printer. Since we don’t have an AirPrint printer, we often like to save it as a Word document and then send it to iTunes on our PC and get it printed that way.

3. WordPress
When we’re away from the desktop, we update our blog through the WordPress app. This app works with both self-hosted and hosted blogs; and once you set up access, you can switch between all your blogs if you run multiple blogs with a simple click.

    One thing we have noticed is that if you use any special entities in your blog posts (for example ‘&’ or ‘—’) it doesn’t like these in the form of &amp or &ndash (respectively), but prefers decimal entities (& or –). So be wary of that when using special character entities in your blog posts when using this app to publish.

    Another reason to use this app whilst on the iPad is that there seems to be a problem with typing up a blog entry using the Safari browser. The problem we encountered was not being able to scroll down in the text box where you type up the blog. This meant that when we get to the end of the text box, any text that was outside the area of the text box was hidden; so the WordPress app is needed.

4. CalculatorLab
We’ve been looking for a good calculator that did a little more than a basic add-and-subtract, multiply-and-divide equation. We were looking for something that allowed input of parenthesis, squares, cubes, like a scientific calculator. We finally found one that not only had everythingwe were looking for, but it is also well-designed, free and displayed multiple lines. This calculator is more than we could ask for a free calculator app!

5. iBooks
This app is awesome. We just love the design of it. We love that you can display books in the bookshelf view or as a list. You are able to change the paper colour to white or sepia as well as the font the text is displayed in. This app can be a great way to learn new vocabulary, too. When you read a book in this app and find a word you don’t understand, you can tap the word and use iBook’s dictionary to find its meaning. Is that cool or what?

6. Dictionary
The Dictionary app is created by the people at Dictionary.com. We love this site and often visit it whenever we want to find the meaning to a word or look up a synonym on their online thesaurus. Now, we don’t have to visit their site, we can look up words in the dictionary and the thesaurus included in this app. What’s more, we don’t have to have an Internet connection to access the words. This is very handy for people who love to find new words or synonyms to use in their writing. The features that do require an Internet connection is when you wish to listen the word’s pronunciation or check out the “Word of the Day” which the app offers.

    So there we have it. The above six are our favourite apps on iPad. You may have noticed that a lot of them are related to writing in some way. This is because we mainly use the iPad for writing and blogging (and when we’re not writing, we use the device to play games : oP : oP). If you like to write, you might like to try some of these apps to help you jot down ideas quickly, write and read some of your favourite books with. Don’t forget about to check out the CalculatorLab app: that has nothing to do with writing, but you never know when you might need it to calculate something—like the cost of a shopping list of books and stationery for your writing endeavours. : oP : oP.

Make perfect macarons with our new eBook, Making Macarons: What Recipes Don’t Tell You

We’re back with our third installment to our Macarons, Quest for Perfection blog series: Technique, Macaronnage.

Just in case we have some readers who are looking to make macarons for the first time, and are looking for information to what this particular step is, we will explain what Macaronnage is. Macaronnage is the stage where you mix the ground almonds/icing sugar mixture with the egg white foam. Getting this technique right is important; so it’s worthwhile to practice and understand how to do this correctly and get the right consistency.

    We are going to mention three methods in this post, but they are not the only ways to achieve the right consistency of the batter. We have also chosen to write about the following three methods to illustrate that this stage does not require it to be a delicate process—in fact, you don’t want to be too delicate: you actually want to knock out some air so you can obtain the right consistency as well as avoid potential air pockets during baking.

    The first method is to fold the ground almonds/icing sugar mixture (from now on, we’ll just refer to this mixture as ‘GA/IS mixture’ for ease of typing : oP : oP) into the egg whites in multiple additions: you divide the GA/IS mixture into three to six parts; add each part to the egg white foam, reasonably incorporating each part. Once combined, fold, rotate the bowl and fold again. Continue in this manner until the right consistency is achieved.

    The second method is similar to the first method except for the way you get the batter to the right consistency. With this method, you add the GA/IS mixture to the egg white foam, incorporate roughly (through folding) then press down on the batter until you get the right consistency. The way you do the last part is bring your spatula to the bottom of the bowl in the centre, press down and drag up against the side of the bowl (this technique is known as the macaronner). Rotate the bowl and press and drag 2 – 3 more times. Gather the batter back into the centre and repeat the pressing down technique until the right consistency is reached. With this method you can add the GA/IS mixture in parts or all at once.

    The third method utilises the score-and-fold method. Add the entire GA/IS mixture into the egg white foam. Take the spatula and score through the egg white foam three or four times (like you’re drawing an asterix in the bowl), then fold until you get to the right consistency. This method isn’t as popularly used, but it works. It also shows that you can be sort of rough with the egg white foam and still it’ll all be okay.

    If you’re wondering which method we prefer, it is the second method where we fold roughly then press down on the batter. We like this method because the process is fast and the ingredients get incorporated well. Whenever we need to add colour, we can add it during or after the whipping of the egg whites and the colour will still get incorporated without streaks.

    Below, are a couple of images of the technique we use, of how we macaronner:

    A couple more notes about the macaronnage: when adding the ground almond/icing sugar mixture onto the egg white foam, you may want to scatter lightly instead of pouring it onto the foam. There are people who just dump it in and it seems to work for them, but we suggest not doing this to prevent deflating it too much initially and ending up with the wrong consistency at the end.

The Correct Consistency – Ways to Test When the Batter is Done

Thus far, we’ve been referring to the right consistency a lot without saying what the right consistency is, so we shall try to enlighten. The right consistency is when the batter in your bowl resembles a shiny thickshake. When you pick the batter up with a spatula and let it fall back into the bowl, a ribbon forms and slowly gathers in a pile below. The speed at which the batter falls down to the bowl of batter is gingerly or relaxedly; it isn’t at all speedy.

    The best way to judge if you’ve got the right consistency is to count the number of seconds it takes to settle back down into the batter. This is the most reliable way we have found. It has never failed us. The time it takes for that ribbon of batter to sink back into the batter in the bowl is around 30 seconds: watch one portion of the ribbon making contact with the bowl of batter below. Start counting. By the time you reach 30 seconds, that portion of the ribbon should have sunken back into the batter, only a faint outline of it is visible by this time. This is a good indication that after the batter is piped, the peaks will slowly sink back and give you flat tops and remain beautiful and sturdy disks.

We use the ribbon test. Here, we begin to keep an eye on a section of the ribbon and initiate the 30 second count. We are keeping an eye on the section of ribbon labelled ‘FL’.

This is around 15 seconds. Also notice and compare the spread of the batter on the left-hand side where we have scooped batter up from. Notice the slow expansion with each image.

This is around 25 seconds and the section looks to be good as the section is sinking back into the batter with only a faint line visible. The batter has expanded more.

 

This is 30 seconds. The batter has slowed down in spreading out and the line has remained faint. There is only a small bit of ribbon still to sink back into the batter. This is the consistency the macaron batter should be.

A clearer picture of the ribbon can be seen here as we pour the macaron batter into the piping bag. The macaron batter is a nice, thick, flowing, continuous ribbon.

The ribbon folding and piling neatly and perfectly in the piping bag. It looks exactly like a ribbon!

    An alternative way to test consistency is to do a test pipe. You can grab a plate and place a dollop of batter on it. If it flattens down, spread a bit and still hold its shape, the batter is ready.

    A number of recipes gives directions on the number of strokes or folds for the macaronnage. This method of telling when the batter is done is not only inflexible, but can be detrimental than helpful because it doesn’t account for someone’s individual folding style (longer/shorter strokes, heavy-/light-handed, faster/slower folding action). The number of folds/strokes is a good guide when starting out, but spotting the correct look and consistency of the macaron batter, understanding the look and consistency through practice, will benefit in the long run and will allow one to increase/decrease the batch size, to add different gel or liquid colouring and/or flavours to the recipe or change to a whole new recipe without needing to recalculate the number of folds to suit the changes. Treat the direction in recipes that use this method as a guide. Don’t rely on that information too much. Rather, train your eyes on spotting the perfect batter look and consistency.

Comparisons: Perfect, Over- and Under-mixed Batter

Perfect

We find that good batter has the look and consistency of a thickshake—the glossy and thick look. When the batter is in the piping bag and you have the bag vertical to the tray with no pressure applied, batter peek and flow out of the nozzle by itself, but it is at a (slow) speed that it still gives you time to position your piping bag before piping. This is not a sign of an over-mixed batter. It is a sign of good batter. As long as it’s not streaming out, the batter is good. Perfect.

    When the disks are piped, the tips of the first macaron shell will be almost gone by the time you go to the second row. If you find that even after you finish the whole tray (20 or so) soft tips remain on the majority of the disks, the macaron shells are still okay: rap (hit or tap) the tray on the countertop and the tips should disappear. Such batter is still good batter and can produce good results. The macaron shells will flatten down a bit after rapping, but still hold their shape. The piped disks look sturdy, full and round as they sit to form a crust/skin.

Over-mixing

When the batter is over-mixed, the batter that has been put into the piping bag will flow out of the piping bag nozzle much faster than the perfect batter—so much so that when you flip the piping bag vertical to the baking sheet, you find that you have to be quick with your reflexes to flip the piping bag back up to stop the batter from flowing down. You will also find the action of piping round, even-sized circles difficult to control.

    After over-mixed batter is piped, the disks are flatter, thinner and more reflective in the light than good batter. It doesn’t hold its shape and eventually spreads out to irregular circles after a few minutes of resting. Sometimes, they even look like sad puddles of wet paint.

    Over-mixed batter will produce macarons that can come out looking somewhat like macarons. Feet can develop on the macarons when in the oven, but only very (very) slightly in height. It may remain at the end of the baking time after some shrinkage. The macaron shells can look smooth, but fragile.

Under-mixing

When the batter is under-mixed, the piped macaron shells do not flatten out as much and the tips remain. Under-mixed batter doesn’t spread out and remains as they were piped with the slight peaks still in place. It’s not so obvious when the batter is only slightly under-mixed as the tips do sink down and disappear after some time, but we notice that the disks look a little bulkier. When under-mixed batter still sinks down, you can usually tell that it is under-mixed by the paler colour of the macaron disks. The ability to distinguish under-mixed batter through the disks’ colour will require comparison with previous experience with seeing good piped batter, however.

    The image above appear to be a perfectly well-piped disk, but this image was captured after the batter has been sitting for 5 or so minutes. You can not tell by simply looking at this without a comparison, but this batter was much whiter than past uncoloured batter. It has not flattened down, peak is still visible and looks much bulkier than batter that is perfectly mixed.

Final Note

Ever since coming across macarons and this term ‘macaronnage’ and learning of its importance, we’ve taken the cautious route and tested the batter early, making sure the batter is of the right consistency and flowed right. We found that our frequent 30-second ribbon tests and attention to whether the batter sinks back in this time is what helped train us and our eyes to spot the correct batter consistency. We would suggest doing the same so that you learn to tell what the right consistency is without having to rely on the number of strokes. Doing this will give you just that little more control; you’ll be able to make big and small batches without worrying about how many strokes you need for the varying batch sizes you may want to make. If you use the 30-second test and check early, the line between perfectly-mixed and over-mixed batter will also not be as fine as many have stated.

    That is all for this installment. Our next section, we will be talking about Environmental Factors. Hope to see you back here soon!

See our other posts in Macarons, Quest for Perfection blog series:

    Only problem is, we don’t know how to type Chinese. There was the option of using Windows Text and Input Languages, but all that was available was typing Chinese using Pinyin. We don’t know Pinyin. If we could find something that allowed us to input strokes instead that’d be a more achievable task to learn. It was either that or count the strokes—which we did find; however it was too slow: it took us as long as 30 minutes to find one character! The fact that we also had trouble counting strokes, sometimes we relied on stumbling through the radicals table took us even longer. We’re surprised we even managed, considering we had no idea what radicals were to begin with.

    It was not till recently we found out that we could enable a handwriting recognition feature in Microsoft Office that saved us from that painfully slow way of transcribing the recipes. Apparently, Microsoft Office 2003 (quite an old version, we know : o) : o) ) has handwriting recognition features that could be installed and activated; and at the Microsoft website, there were two files available for download that allowed Chinese handwriting recognition! These are the files that we are talking about SINTSETP.MSI and TINTSETP.MSI. Once installed, you can input Chinese without having to know anything about Pinyin, the radicals or stroke order. Just use the IME Pad and ‘draw’ the character. It’s fantastic.

    As we have previously stated, in order to use this feature, you do need Microsoft Office (Standard Edition 2003 or later we’d imagine). If you do have it and you have been wanting to type some Chinese and getting it translated via Google Translate, you can do so by following the steps below. One final note, the steps are for Windows XP, so it may differ if you have an operating system that is different.

Installing Handwriting Recognition Files

1. Download SINTSETP.MSI and TINTSETP.MSI from Microsoft’s website and save it onto your hard-drive.

2. Double-click each Installer file to install. The program will ask you to Run it then the rest will come up in Chinese. It’s not necessary to know what it means to get it installed. You can get an idea of what the buttons are by the letters in the brackets: (N) is Next, (B) is back, (A) is accept (for the user agreement part of it) and (D) is decline. If you’re uncomfortable with installing a program that’s in Chinese and wish to know exactly what it means, it may be best to get someone who knows the language to help you install it. We just went ahead with it without understanding anything in the dialog boxes and clicked the buttons.

3. Go to “Start > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs”, wait for it to populate.

4. Scroll down to find “Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003″.

5. Click “Change” button and wait for the wizard to load.

6. Select “Add or Remove Features” then click “Next” at the bottom of the window.

7. Below the listed programs available, check “Choose advanced customization of applications”. If the Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook programs are checked, you can leave them checked, you don’t need to worry about unchecking them.

8. Click “Next”. You will be brought to another window to “Choose update options for application and tools”.

9. Expand “Office Shared Features”. Scroll down until you see “Microsoft Handwriting Component”. Click the little arrow to reveal the menu, and select “Run from My Computer”. Click “Update” at the bottom of the window. And you’re done with the installations. If at any point it asks you to insert the Microsoft Office CD, do so. We didn’t have to though.

Activating Chinese Handwriting Recognition

1. Go to “Start > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options”.

2. Click “Languages” tab.

3. In the “Text services and input languages” section, click “Details”

4. The “Text Services and Input Languages” window will pop up. In the “Settings” tab, go to the section called “Installed services”. Click the “Add…”

5. The “Add Input Language” window appears. Under “Input language”, select “Chinese (Taiwan)” from the drop-down menu.

6. Check “Keyboard layout/IME and select “Chinese (Traditional) – New Phonetic” from the drop-down menu. Also check “Handwriting recognition” and select “Drawing Pad”.

7. Click “OK” twice to apply and exit all windows.

Using Chinese Handwriting Recognition

1. Open your favourite writing program, e.g. Word or Wordpad.

2. Go to your toolbar at the bottom and you should see a “CH” icon. If it’s on “EN”, left-click the icon and change it to “CH”.

3. Left-click the “CH” icon and click “Show language bar”.

4. When the language bar appears, click “Tools” (3rd button on the language bar) and select IME pad.

5. A drawing pad appears on the bottom of your screen. Now take your mouse or tablet pen and start writing Chinese. Simple!

Make perfect macarons with our new eBook, Making Macarons: What Recipes Don’t Tell You

If you recall, a few weeks back we posted a blog about our decision to churn out perfect macarons as our next challenge. Well, this week, we’re back with our second installment. We thought we’d briefly write about the different types of meringues one can use to make macarons and which method we decided to go with, the environment we bake in (this is particularly important to know as every environment is different—more on this in future installments), and an equipment list. We find that although there is a lot of great information and advice out there on websites and blogs, sometimes the kind of information we really wish bakers would provide is the environment they work in when making the macarons and the kind of equipment one bakes with. So, for this second installment, we will be listing the method we use, the recipe as well as our baking environment and our equipment.

Method / Meringue Type

There are three methods to making the meringues for macarons: Italian (Sucre Cuit) meringue, French meringue and Swiss meringue, but the most common methods used are Italian and French.

    With the Sucre Cuit method, it uses a cooked meringue to produce the macarons. One portion of the egg whites is incorporated into the ground almond/icing sugar mixture, and the other portion is whipped and incorporated with a hot sugar syrup. The two mixtures are then folded into each other and incorporated. With the French meringue method, the macarons are produced by whipping room temperature egg whites to stiff peaks before folding in the ground almond/icing sugar mixture. The Sucre Cuit method requires precision when handling the sugar syrup, but has a less likely chance of overmixing and less affected by environmental factors. The French Meringue method, on the otherhand, you do not have to deal with precise temperatures of the sugar syrup; but has a lower success rate as it is much more susceptible to overmixing and environmental factors.

    The method we prefer to use is the French Meringue method. As our experiment is based on macarons made with the French Meringue, our findings may or may not relate to the Italian Meringue version, particularly with the information about drying time. We have read that the Italian Meringue requires little to no drying time because of the difference in method from the French Meringue.

Macaron Flavour and Size

We make plain almond macaron shells that were average-sized. The piped rounds are 3.5cm in diameter on baking paper. The ingredients consists of only the four main ingredients: ground almonds, icing sugar, caster sugar and egg whites.

Baking Environment

All the baking of macarons takes place at the heart of the winter season, between the months of July through to August and into the first weeks of the spring month of September which means cold temperatures in the mid teens (measured in Celcius) and high humidity between 70% – 100%. We experienced ranging climates: clear sunny skies, rain and even snow. No air conditioning or heater was used. We did use a dehumidifier later in our quest for perfect macarons. The changing conditions of our baking environment (which at times was worse than those outdoors and other times better) was one of the factors that produced unpredictable results. We will be talking about this at length later on!

Equipment (in alphabetical order)

Baking Paper

We use Glad baking paper. We have read that using silcone baking mats such as Silpat results in lower feet, and when blunders happen the macarons are harder to remove. For the reason that we do wish to maximise our chances of getting nice height on the feet and easy removal, we have chosen baking paper. A downside of baking paper is it tends to wrinkle with heat and make the macaron disks misshapen. Silicone baking mats would be better in this area.

    If you don’t have either baking paper or a silicon mat, you could try non-stick baking tray or if it’s available where you live, a non-stick macaroon baking tray. We discovered this type of tray for macaroons on our adventure upon looking for more baking equipment. We’ve never tried the non-stick macaroon baking trays, but we don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t work. Just make sure you let the macaron shells cool completely before lifting them or have a cake spatula to remove them or else they may stick. Here’s a link we found online to a macaron baking tray. Just be very careful. This is just an idea not a suggestion, so we caution you if you use non-stick baking trays or macaroon baking trays without baking paper.

Baking Sheet Type

Our ones are those we got with our oven, pretty sturdy, thick and charcoal-coloured; and not non-stick. Dark-coloured baking trays absorb heat and hence provides that much needed heat when heat is weak from below and from information we have learnt, thicker baking sheets are better than thin ones if there is strong heat coming from the bottom. Excessive heat from below may result in macarons browning at the base or tops may crack from excessive pressure from below.

Digital Electronic Scale

It is important to have accurate measurements to make macarons. Cups and mechanical scales are not accurate enough. Like they say, baking is as much an art as it is science so the right weight and composition of ingredients will get you the desired results.

Foil (one sheet)

Having a sheet of foil is dependent on if you need something to reflect some of the strong heat from a particular heat source. We placed a foil sheet over the shelf closest to the top element (this is the only element present in our oven; it is used for grilling and baking) to reflect some of the strong heat coming from it (macaron shells burned without it!). This can be applied to reflect heat coming from the bottom element, too if the bottom is the position of your element for baking. If you are finding that the bottoms of your macarons are cooking too fast/browns: place an ovenware or foil (or both) on a free shelf between the bottom element and the shelf your macarons sit on to reflect some of the heat. You will need to test and see if this is a requirement.

Electric Hand Mixer

We use a five-speed hand mixer. A lot of people use stand mixers like the KitchenAid range (a yellow, green or red one would be nice!!). If you have a stand mixer , that is good, especially for large batches!

Oven Thermometer

The macarons need to be cooked at an exact temperature. Guessing may produce bad results. We use a Salter oven themometer to measure the accuracy of our oven’s themostat. If you know your oven is accurate, then you don’t need an oven thermometer.

Oven Type

Our oven is a wall convection (fan-forced/fan-assisted) oven with only an element at the top. The fan is at the back. It has a turn dial thermostat and is not digital.

Metal / Stainless Steel Bowls

We use metal bowls to beat our egg whites. These bowls are cleaned and dried thoroughly to rid any grease residue or moisture. Grease and water interferes with foam production and tends to deflate the egg whites.

    Plastic bowls are not recommended when beating egg whites. Plastic often contain oil residue on its surface from previous usage despite having it washed well. Glass bowls are okay, too, but we prefer metal bowls.

    Many people have recommended using copper bowls for whipping as the reaction between copper ions that is released from the bowl and the egg whites can produce a more stable, more voluminous egg white foam. Although this may be the case (as an experiment we found online had proved), there is concern over the toxicity risk. You may wish to verify this yourself, but if memory has it right, the levels were one-tenth of our normal daily intake per cup of egg white. This is not enough to cause problems, but some books have mentioned that recommendation in the use of copper bowls ceased due to this potential of taking in too much copper in the body. If you plan to use such bowls, you might want to research more on copper bowls and double check the toxicity levels when used to beat egg whites.

Nut / Spice Grinder

We use a small nut/spice grinder. This is to process the ground almonds and icing sugar finely so the macarons have that smooth shell.

Piping Bag and 8mm – 10mm Plain Round Nozzle

We have Wilton‘s 14″ piping bag and Kaiser 9mm, 33-6, ring nozzle. We would have gotten either a Wilton piping bag and nozzle set or Kaiser piping bag and nozzle set, but the shop we went to stocked only Wilton piping bags (but no Wilton nozzles) and Kaiser nozzles (but no Kaiser piping bags). If you don’t have these, you could simply make a piping bag out of paper or a sandwich bag with a 8mm – 10mm hole cut at the corner of the paper/sandwich bag.

Pizza Stone

The pizza stone (ours is a Typhoon 40″ pizza stone) may not be necessary if you have an oven that has a bottom element and distributes heat evenly. For macarons, there needs to be heat coming from below the macarons to lift the shell and create the signature feet. With us not having a bottom element, only having the top, we have a pizza stone to hold the heat and distribute it from the bottom: it sort of acts as our “bottom element” to provide that bottom source of heat. We placed it at the lowest shelf.

    We may one day take the pizza stone out to see if the oven is still good for macaron baking, but we will keep it for our future macaron-baking endeavours, just until we are confident and happy with our abilities to consistently produce successful batches of macarons. It’s like the saying goes, “Why change something when it ain’t broke?”

Room Thermometer and Hygrometer

We have found a room thermometer and hygrometer (an instrument that measures humidity) handy to measure the temperature and humidity levels in our baking environment. It is very important to know how ‘wet’ a baking environment is since, for one, macarons don’t like moisture much and it deflates it or it causes the egg whites used in the macarons to not be as stable as it can be. More about temperature and humidity later!

Sieve

We use this to sift our ground almond and icing sugar. You will need a fine sieve to do this after processing it in the nut/spice grinder. This will separate the lumps, clumps after processing the almonds and icing sugar. It will keep back big pieces of ground almonds (if there are any left) that weren’t processed and should be discarded if you want a smooth top.

Spatula

We use a silicone spatula—a flat silicone one is good.

That is all for this section. Next, we will be talking about Technique: Macaronnage!

See our other posts in Macarons, Quest for Perfection blog series:

    Heading out of there, we pondered and digested this new information. We later realised that this is probably what ‘tethering’ must be. We had seen this term come up in our search for a MiFi device online multiple times, but we never investigated this method further because they related to an iPhone; and we don’t own iPhones.

    But then neither did we own Android phones. What we do own are Nokia phones—but then, if they had tethering apps for Android phones and iPhones, maybe they had tethering apps for Nokia (Nokia were one of the most popular phones on the market before iPhones and Androids came into the scene). We did a search, and lo and behold! there was. JoikuSpot was the name of the app. Its developer, JoikuSoft Oy.

    JoikuSpot is offered in both a free version, JoikuSpot Light and a pay version, JoikuSpot Premium. The two versions offers to connect multiple WiFi-only devices to the Internet, with download and upload statistics as well as which devices are connected to your 3G connection. There is no time limitations to how long the app can be used either. The difference between the free and pay versions is the ability to name your WiFi hotspot and add encryption. In the free version the hotspot name is JoikuSpot and your connection is public, which means anyone can use your hotspot.

    If you’re wondering what the speed of the connection is like, it is between 12kbps – 60kbps. It’s not broadband fast—if you’re browsing a normal site that is not designed for a mobile device, it does take a good 5 seconds (sometimes more) to load—but we didn’t expect them to be since we are using Nokia smartphones that were never too fast to begin with. If you are concerned about the speeds, test it out with JoikuSpot Light before you purchase the more secure Premium version.

    Overall, we’re very pleased with the app. We can now browse the Internet, check email, post on social networks on the go on our laptops, PCs and iPads (we haven’t tried connecting a gaming console like a Nintendo DS, but that gives us a thought and will try this) without having to search for a WiFi hotspot. It saved us a couple hundred dollars and of having to carry around another piece of technology. It’s perfect.

    Give the app a go if you own a compatible Nokia or a Sony Ericsson phone. Try the Light version then purchase the Premium app (that’s what we both did). It’s a tiny cost compared to a MiFi device. At the time of writing this, JoikuSpot Premium is going for $9 EUR (about $15.30 NZD/$13 USD according to the site). If you’re looking to buy an iPad or any other tablet out there, you might want to see if your phone can share a connection in a similar fashion before forking out extra money on the 3G model, too.

Happy surfing!

Make perfect macarons with our new eBook, Making Macarons: What Recipes Don’t Tell You

We’ve gotten onto the train of macaron making (several years late from the hype, we know!) and we decided that our next challenge is to turn out a batch of these French cookies. We’re by no means professional bakers, but we like to think that we can churn out a pretty good batch of baked goods if we studied up enough on the recipe and technique.

    We were told that these macarons were tasty, but tasty things comes with a price: they are extremely hard to make! Get the technique wrong or miss a step, it means you get unsightly, wrinkly disks instead of the cute domes with the beautiful, characteristic frilly feet, a glossy shell and light interior. So, we went on our way and studied up on macarons like we were trying to ace university exams. We processed the information and soaked it all in. Then, confident we had equipped ourselves with enough knowledge, obtained the equipment and the right ingredients, we set about making them.

    Our first attempt was on a day that snowed. Outside was a winter wonderland with snow 5cm high (not deep at all—no. Still, it was enough to keep us indoors for a good part of the day) with a harsh -10°C windchill at one point. We could see our breath indoors!—that was how cold it was.

    It has been said that one shouldn’t bake macarons on a wet day. They were right. Although the day may not have been wet; the air in the kitchen was definitely damp. It was not good! Our macarons came out flat, feetless, heavy looking and cracked. They resembled small gingernut biscuits than macarons. We didn’t think it was our technique. The batter had looked right, flowing like the online videos that we had watched before starting. And we didn’t think it was our measuring nor did we think it was our equipment: we had a digital weigh, a good bowl and rubber spatula for mixing, and we had thick baking sheets to cook the macarons on. We can only put the poor result down to baking on a cold and wet day like many have warned not to do! But we were so excited and had to start!

    So, we set out to pick a warmer, drier day and gave even more care to following the steps of the recipe. We failed this time, too. Like a lot of others who were new to making macarons, we were sad to see yet another batch of failed macarons and was left to wonder if it was our technique, and not the humidity we blamed for our initial failure. We went off and did further research to study the technique again as well as find out other possible causes and began again the next day based on our findings.

    Unlike the last two times where we placed all of the macarons in the oven, this time we placed one to two macarons into the oven at a time. We began the elimination process of possible causes. We tested various temperature settings, tray placements and suggested techniques. And one after the other, it came out badly, producing flat disks, burnt disks, translucent disks, sticky disks and uncooked disks.

    We went on another research period. This time, we researched not only information relating to the cause of failed macaron batches again, but also the effects the environment has on our baking, how ovens and their different layout can affect our results and the way these particular ingredients in the macaron recipes interact with each other. We applied the new knowledge to our baking, testing one macaron in the oven at a time as we again went through the elimination process of possible reasons for failure to produce a pretty macaron. One by one, they came out failures. With only six uncooked macarons left on the countertop, we began thinking that maybe getting these beautiful dome-shaped cookies to appear in our oven window was beyond our skills. We looked at the countertop full of macarons-gone-wrong then to the six uncooked macarons: “What should we do? We wasted enough electricity testing, as well as eggs, sugar and ground almonds in the last several days. Give up? Throw them out?”. We decided to chuck in the oven the last six macarons. We figured we would cook them, have them fail and then call it quits—at least for a while. Enough was enough.

    It’s funny when you think you’ve lost all hope of succeeding, something happens. Through the oven window, we see what we had failed to see and wanted so bad to see. We saw feet! The shell was lifting off the baking paper like it should and developing feet! It was not high—only a couple millimetres—but it was results. Good results! After seeing this, we discussed a little about why these produced feet and why the others previous hadn’t. We slowly came to a sort of an understanding to what it took to get these little cute dome-shaped cookies to come out right.

    Excited, we made a fresh batch of batter the very next day. We piped them and put them in the oven. We waited and stared with hope and anticipation. In the first minute, little happened—nothing in fact. By the second minute, we had feet—much higher than the day before! Feet, the very feature that makes a macaron a macaron; and it developed by the second minute! A recipe had informed us that this would happen between the 5th and 6th minute, so for it to happen on the second minute, this was quite a surprise. We were aware that they can develop feet within the first and second minutes, but we didn’t think ours would.

    This was very exciting!

    We continued to watch the progress of the cookies through the oven window. We watched them have shells that remained smooth and strong, and continued to rise and develop feet to a good height. At the end of the baking time, we had macarons!

    By George, we got it! We had figured it out!

This batch were plain French meringue macarons filled with a mango and passionfruit filling. They had a bit of a collapsed feet, but the interiors were full. It was the beginnings of our path to producing the perfect macaron!

    To share our success, in the coming weeks, we will be posting our experience and what we learned in installments. For those of you out there who love macarons and wish to try making them yourselves, because 1) you think they are just delicious, and 2) they cost a whole heap to buy from patisseries and you don’t want to break your wallet funding your love for them! We hope our installments will give you some insight into what you might need to do to get good macarons to appear in your oven window. The installments will cover the equipment we use, the recipe we found that works, our findings on what might have caused the failed attempts, environmental factors and any adjustments we have made to achieve the macarons.

    We hope you join us on our journey to making the perfect macaron!

See our other posts in Macarons, Quest for Perfection blog series:

    We consulted our trusted grammar book, “Grammar for Dummies” that’s been sitting in the bookshelves gathering dust (no, not really, it was dust-free, but we haven’t opened it up in a while) and looked up all the pages that talk about ‘me’. It told us:

    An object pronoun is a noun that act as objects: me, him, her, you, them, us, it. Object pronouns receive actions.

    A subject pronoun is a noun that stands in for/refers to a subject: I, he, she, you, they, we, it. Subject pronouns performs actions.

    In other words, subjects does things to/with objects:

    So ‘me’ can never be subjects of sentences (it’s an object pronoun!) and can only receive actions from those performed by subjects like ‘I’—a subject pronoun. Therefore, with that definition, the example sentences below, sentence A is correct while sentence B is incorrect:

    Jon is a subject. ‘I’ is a subject (pronoun), but ‘me’ is not a subject but an object. You can test sentence A is correct and B is incorrect by removing one of the subjects (remove Jon) from the sentence:

NOT…

‘Me’ can’t push Daisy, but ‘I’ can push Daisy!

    Then there’s ‘Between you and I’, ‘Between you and me’.

    We were watching some tv and we heard tv characters and tv hosts say, ‘between you and I’, but we’ve always believed that ‘between you and me’ is the correct one. We thought that maybe we were wrong. Surely screenwriters know their rules. Then we heard Sheldon Cooper, the character from The Big Bang Theory say, ‘between you and me’. Sheldon Cooper, a character who seems to be the type to be accurate and correct, must care about speaking with proper grammar, so ‘between you and me’ had to be correct, or is his speaking odd like he is?

    It seems not all writers are great at grammar, or maybe writers do know, but it’s their characters who speak incorrectly (writers are only writing them realistically).

    ‘Between you and me’ is the correct one.

    The explanation is that object pronouns (such as me) follow prepositions (at, between, towards, for, come, through, under, to, in, etc).

You can again test which is incorrect by removing one of the subjects (remove Jon/You) from the sentence. Removing Jon/You in the correct sentences gives you—

    When we think we’ve got it down-packed, there are sentences like “It is me”—”It is me, who took the dog for a walk”. In these sentences, using me sounds right, but the sentences should be spoken with ‘I’.

    The reason is the word, ‘is’. ‘Is’ is what you call a linking verb (more information about Linking Verbs). Subject pronouns follows linking verbs not object pronouns. That’s why the correct pronoun to go in the above sentence is ‘I’ and not ‘me’.

    In saying this, though, using ‘me’ in a sentence like ‘It is me’ appears to not be entirely faux pas. Common usage of ‘me’ in such sentences has made using ‘me’ acceptable in conversational speech/informal settings even though using ‘me’ in ‘it is me’ isn’t proper grammar. Grammaticians apparently will not bark at you for using me instead of I when everyone says ‘It is me’ and it is rare to find someone say ‘It is I’!

    The research certainly has enlightened us! Hopefully, it has enlightened you. The next time you hear someone say “You and I” or “You and me”, you’ll know yourself which one is correct/proper grammar!

    We love this program. It’s simple to use and supports a great number of video formats. The supported input formats include, AVI, WMV, MOV, MP4, M4V, RM, RMVB, FLV, MKV, MPG, VOB, DIVX, AMV. This is just a short list. The program supports many other formats, and ones that we, and most probably, many have never even heard of.

    In terms of the output formats, this is a list of what the program supports: MP4, FLV, SWF, MPG, AVI, WMV, ASF, MKV, M2TS, and MPG. The list isn’t as extensive, but it does support many common formats supported in popular media players and portable devices[*]. As well, if you’re trying to convert your source file so that it is supported by your video editing program, the ones Any Video Converter offer is more than sufficient—since at least one in the list is accepted by most video editing software/freeware.

    Another great feature about this video converter is it has the ability to take your video file and output sound too. So, let’s say you have a Flash Video file (FLV) that has some audio on it, and you’d like to output it as a WAV. To do this, you simply add the video file to be converted, select output to WAV, and then convert away. A short time later, voilà, you now have an audio file that can be listened to on your computer or audio player, or you can use it as a soundtrack for a project you’re producing. Very handy feature.

    The last feature we want to mention about is the program’s ability to save captures/snapshots of the video footage as still images. Whilst the video is playing, you click the camera icon on the program’s control bar and the image is saved as a PNG to the designated path you set in the Options menu item. This feature isn’t very accurate if you wish to capture an exact frame like you do in an actual video editing program, but it is handy if you wish to capture a random shot to use as a thumbnail for your blog or website. Handy!

    There are quite a number of features in this simple video converter. It not only converts video to other video formats, but it can also act as an audio extractor by inputting a video file and outputting it as an audio file. To put the icing on the cake, there’s a feature to obtain image stills from the footage. Awesome!

* Any Video Converter doesn’t seem to output video files too nicely if you’re hoping to convert your source file to MP4 for the Sony Video Walkman. For a program that does work, our blog post entitled “Finally! A video converter for the Sony Video Walkman!” suggests one.

It’s been many years since we’ve had a notable snowfall in the city: six years if memory has it right. Snow covered the city, but not nearly as much as today’s. Where we are, 10cm to 20cm fell. Other parts of the city, it was reported to be 30cm (so that would be a feet of snow for people used to the imperial measurement system).

    When the weather forecasters said there is snow heading our way, we had our doubts. We thought it’d probably miss us, and the prediction is really for the hill areas—or we’ll have sleety showers like most of the time but not snow. Well, we got proven wrong and they got it right. They said snow will fall, that it will fall here; That it did. They even got the days right and the time, too!

    So now we’ve got snow and it continues to fall heavily. The city isn’t as well equipped for snow as other cities around the world that are more experienced with significant amounts of snow. Where they probably continue business as normal, we here have closures of roads, businesses, schools and the airport. The authorities have advised people to stay off the roads and only travel if absolutely necessary due to dangerous driving conditions. Only people with 4-wheel-drives should venture out in the deep snow we heard the reports say. So what do we do with this sudden confinement? We head out to the backyard and build a snowman!

    What do you think of our snowman? We always like to build and sculpt the snowman completely of snow. That means no carrot for the nose, no buttons for the eyes and mouth, no twigs for the arms, and no wool scarf and hat. Just snow. : o) : o). We decided to make a couple of bunny rabbits, too. They don’t belong in the Winter season; but they’re white, the snow is white and they’re cute, so we had to include them!

    “Sorry, the GeoCities web site you were trying to reach is no longer available” is the message we get.

    Looking at this, it was kind of sad. Our fansite, which we devoted so much of our time on during our younger days, no longer exists. Over three hundred pages, fifteen or so sections with many more sub-sections and sub-sub-sections, disappeared within a day. We did back it up onto our hard-drive and we could always relaunch it on this domain of ours (we might someday), but it just wasn’t the same. We had hoped that our Star Trek Voyager fansite would live on the Internet forever on its original webhost.

    We went through some more pages of search results to find oocities.org. Apparently this site saves and archives pages that were “unique scientific sources or are of great public interest”, “historically interesting”, or “representing the 90′s website culture and style”. Browsing through the paths, we find out that our fansite was one of them saved. We’re not sure which of the three categories we fit into, but we were happy to see that someone went to the trouble of saving some of these GeoCities sites and relaunched them on another webhost in the same structure as GeoCities. We excitedly click on the link to our fansite and see the sky-blue background featuring an overlay of the Voyager crew and Starship Voyager load. They really saved it, we thought. We then click each of the sections to find them missing. They had only managed to grab the first page. What a disappointment.

    It was not until we scanned through the last few pages of the search results on Google, we came across reocities.com, a place that saved our entire site as well as hundreds of thousands of other GeoCities accounts! All the Geocities Neighbourhoods were saved. Millions of pages archived. Our fansite and all its sections, pages, pictures, sounds, were all saved. Our fansite lives on! What’s more, during this search, we found out that our site is part of this Fan History Wiki. We’re not sure what this is, but it’s nice to be included.

    So for those of you who love Star Trek Voyager and are looking for Staj’s Star Trek Voyager Site, go visit our site at http://www.reocities.com/Area51/Starship/9943! It still exists. For those of you who built a site on GeoCities and wish to visit your own site, visit reocities.com. They saved a lot of accounts back in 2009. Chances are, yours is there. If it isn’t, you could see if they’re still accepting files for inclusions. You could also try visiting oocities.org: ours may not have been saved in full, but there were a lot of accounts that were.

Here are the next and final recordings for our singing experiment! 24 weeks of singing done and dusted! It has been a good little experiment of ours. Overall, after six months of doing the vocal exercises, recording our singing, and critiquing ourselves, we have improved. Week one of our singing experiment, we were once grossly off pitch, scratchy, weak in volume, and had great problems with breathing, timing, and pronouncing. Now, although we still have problems in a number of areas, it is not as blindingly pronounced.

    We developed better breath support, enabling us to hold onto notes longer, improved our pitch, and developed a stronger singing voice at the end of it. We probably aren’t ready to sing in front of strangers in a public setting (like at a Karaoke bar), but we’d say we’d be able to sing in a private karaoke booth in front of close friends without being too self-conscious.

    So is singing inherited or can you learn to sing? Us guys think that you can learn to sing. We may not be anywhere near Mariah Carey’s level, but we see we have improved. If we carry on practising and doing research on the voice and how it works, we could probably sound even better.

    We highly recommend you guys who think you can’t sing to try a short ‘singing experiment’ yourselves. Record yourselves, listen to the recordings, and take notes of what you hear, what’s wrong, and try and improve on them. Do this consistently, spend some time reading up on how sounds are produced, how your instrument works, and we assure you, your singing voice will improve.

    Well, here are the final recordings! Thank you so much for listening!

Julia’s cover of Avril Lavigne’s “When You’re Gone”
Listen to Week 24 (1.39MB)

Last recording. I was hoping for a big improvement, but results are it is probably slightly worse than week 23. It’s not a huge step backwards, but it’s not great. I noticed that the note that I’ve had trouble with a lot in the past (remember the three dreaded words in the song: never, there, bed that I’ve referred to in the past?) is present in this recording. Add the word/note of “up” in the first verse, too. Other problems include timing and breath support which are a sort of joint problem I think. I don’t have enough breath support, which leads to unpreparedness, which leads to messing up on the timing. Six months on, I can see I have improved, but there’s definitely a lot more training I need to do to get notes on pitch and a stronger singing voice.

Tania’s cover of Adam Lambert’s “Whataya Want From Me”.
Listen to Week 24 (1.22MB)

Well, this one is better than last time’s recording. Guess my own telling off did me some good. For the most part, I have at least improved from the previous week and don’t sound as lost. I do notice that the same parts of the song continue to trouble me, particularly that long phrase starting at 00:30 that goes up till 00:43. I expend so much energy and concentration on trying to get that phrase through that, thereafter, I completely lose it. Oh, this is the final recording in this singing experiment, so a listen through, I have to say that overall, I have improved and learnt quite a lot of things throughout this experiment. There is still quite a lot of room for improvement, but the last six months, I notice I was slowly understanding where my strengths are and where I was weak at and needed to practise more on.