One of the main activities that I was extremely excited to do in France was our cooking class with La Cuisine Paris. While Jarden and I don’t exactly have great culinary skills, baking french sweets under a local chef’s guide sounded like a dream come true! After much deliberation between what class to choose, (from french pastries, to baguettes and croissants), we decided to take up the infamous French macaron!
La Cuisine Paris was conveniently located down the street from the Hotel de Ville right next to the river seine. It was extremely close to many of Paris highlights, being a 15-20 minute walk to spots such as the Champs Elysse and The Louvre. Our class was from 3pm-5pm, and we were excited to get started.
We began right on time and headed down to the lower level of the building. Beneath contained multiple large, beautiful kitchens, with islands set up with mixing bowls, ingredients, and kitchen aid mixers. We started with 4 other eager participants in our class, keeping the group small so we all have individualized attention.
We met our instructor of the day, Chef Eric! He’s a local Parisian pastry chef that was excited to teach us about the technicalities of baking macarons. Chef Eric grew up in both Paris and the US, and the class was conveniently taught in English. (Chef Eric was also happy to help with the correct pronunciation of my horrible accent!)
With all of our ingredients conveniently prepped and our recipe front and center, we started our ganache, which would be the macaron filling. Our ganache flavors of the day included dark chocolate, mocha, and pistachio.
We then created the meringue, which was one of the most technical parts of the class! We learned that temperature, timing, and exact measurements were extremely important for this step. These tiny cookies were very temperamental!
The piping of the cookie shells was my favorite part. While ours was not as precise as Chef’s Erics of course, we ended up with some adorable baby-sized macarons. We even got to pick which color we wanted to make our shells.
Afterwards we helped our shells find their perfect match, filled them with our ganache, and finalized our macarons! We were so proud of what we created; it was such an accomplishment for us, as our area of expertise generally consists of cereal, mac & cheese, and instant noodles.
We ended up trading some macarons with our other class participants, and we each had a ton to take home and munch on for remainder of our trip. I knew pastry chefs were talented, but my appreciation for their skill and technique exponentially grew during that class. Our macaron baking class was a great bonding experience with Jarden, and we had so much fun doing it!
To find out more about cooking classes with La Cuisine Paris, click here.
La Cuisine Paris
80 Quai de l’hotel de ville
75004 Paris, France
+33 (0) 1 40 51 78 18
