My new baby this Friday is little LUCA with lemony fragrance. Returning are also RASA and JULIETTE.

LUCA buttercream: lemon
RASA milk: toasted coconut + milk chocolate
JULIETTE buttercream: rose

On sale at Liaison for a little while from about 10.30am. Note that most of the time there are limits on how many one customer can buy.

I don't think I'll do many more buttercreams – I'll continue testing some flavours, but I still think the ganaches are a better vehicle for most.

A flavour that didn't get announced last week and was a test of using dried cherry was

ALEX white: dried cherry

This one will definitely return in the future!

Finally, if I have excess stock at some point in the next two weeks, I might do an order-by-email thing as I have done in the past, so if you've missed out at Liaison stay alert!

Available at Liaison for a short while (1-2 hours) this morning from approx 10.30am are:

JULIETTE buttercream: rose
RASA milk: toasted coconut + milk chocolate
VIOLA white: violet + aniseed (VERY little stock)
DARCY orange: orange + cocoa nibs

Some of these flavours will return next week.

I just discovered the contact form has been broken for about two weeks – the only thing to break in my WordPress 3 (site software) upgrade. A fix is in place, so people can now contact me again successfully! Apologies to anyone who has tried and been frustrated. If you know someone who says they've tried to contact me and not heard back, please tell them to drop me a line again.

In order to keep things orderly, I haven't mentioned anything about availability for over a week now. The macarons have still been available at Liaison (thankfully!) but we had to keep it low key. So why am I writing this little note? Because there definitely won't be any macarons at Liaison on Friday this week (13th) or Tuesday next (17th Aug) (the café is closed Fri and Mon while Danny and Siâny have a break).

The macarons will be back on Friday 20th, but don't worry, there'll also be regular supplies on Tuesdays and Fridays in weeks to come. I'll be updating you all soonish about what's happening more broadly.

As many of you know, the macarons sold out extremely quickly this week. I was distressed to hear that some unlucky people were rude to Liaison staff and to some successful purchasers. Macarons are just a type of biscuit, you know. They're not a ticket out of a war-zone, or the last flight out of Sydney, or the latest iPhone.

I've never been at the "hot" end of a baked good before, and I'm flattered by the attention my macarons have received but it was quite a shock to know that people could get so unpleasant because of a delicate biscuit.

Liaison is a small, special place with a great, friendly atmosphere, excellent coffee, tea, chai, marvellous canelés (Thursdays) and other food, and countless loyal regulars. The behaviour of a few visitors spoilt that atmosphere. (Apologies to Siâny and Danny at Liaison wouldn't go astray.)

We are discussing ways to make the sale of macarons work without queues out the door or unfriendliness, but there won't be any updates about availability and flavours until a working solution has been found.

[UPDATE: SOLD OUT]

Tuesday's macarons vanished in about five minutes, so now it's the turn of Fridayphiles to try them. I think they'll last a little bit longer this time… Macarons by Duncan this Friday at Liaison:

PERNILLA white: a delicate blackcurrant ganache. Pleasant tartness with gentle blackcurrant fragrance.

NUNO milk: a milk chocolate and coffee ganache. I think this turned out tasting a little like an old-fashioned coffee truffle.

DIEGO dark: the return of one of my early flavours, with fruity cinnamon combined with dark chocolate. This flavour tends to change with time, with fruity notes mellowing to a light cinnamony background — and I don't yet know which it will be by Friday!

I wasn't so happy with some shells this week — you might find a few with air pockets, sorry!

Macarons by Duncan are available at Liaison café at 22 Ridgway Place, off Little Collins St near Parliament.

In dot points:

• Tuesdays and Fridays only
• available on those days from approx. 10.30am until sold out
• limited stock and flavours per day

I've hinted, there have been rumours, and the cat almost got out of the bag through a lucky coincidence of a flatmate of a blogger being in the right place at the right time…

Meanwhile, Twitterer @essjayeff, better known as Suzanne of essjay.com.au, has already tweeted visual evidence! (Suzanne seems to visit Liaison five times a day, always there for the latest news!)

Macarons by Duncan are now available at Liaison café at 22 Ridgway Place, off Little Collins St near Parliament. (Read Claire's review here.)

In dot points:

• Tuesdays and Fridays only
• available on those days from approx. 10.30am until sold out
• limited stock and flavours per day

And announcing tomorrow's flavours (which were in anonymous preview at Liaison last Friday):

DARCY white: combines white chocolate ganache with a strong dose of vanilla and lovely little pieces of cocoa bean, better known as cocoa nibs. The end result tastes a bit like chocolate ice cream!

BETH milk: that favourite (for some) combination of orange and milk chocolate. I'll admit the atractive mixed shell appearance is the result of a shortage of orange shells, rather than artistic flair;)

[UPDATE: ALL GONE!]

I need to learn the lesson that when things are going well, one should stop experimenting (at least at critical times). You see, I made a ganache today that I was quite proud of. Homemade seville orange marmelade in a white chocolate ganache. Carefully bitter, a touch of vanilla. Then I made a beautifully orange macaron batter. Then I tweaked the mix. Tsk tsk. But things still weren't all bad. Then I put the piped shells in the oven. And then I played with a function on the oven. Tsk tsk tsk tsk. I should know better. Seriously ugly shells and, I hate to say, crunchy too (this will mellow with a few days maturation).

Meanwhile, I've been battling with the torments of caramel. If it's easily pipeable, it's too runny on the shell. If it's kinda thick enough, it's a pain to pipe. And, foolishly, I stacked quite a few finished macarons on top of each other for transportation this afternoon… Caramel is rather heavy dense (unlike the shells), so the top layer of macarons did a good job of squeezing the caramel out of the bottom layer of macarons. Sigh.

Which brings me to the thing many of you were waiting for today. A few weeks ago I quietly announced a giveaway of mandarin/cinnamon macarons to my email and Twitter subscribers, with much success and some lovely blush-inducing praise. Now I can offer a small number of 4-packs of YANNIC, my salted caramel macaron which lots of people have liked in the past. I had hoped to have rather a lot more available, but, well, macawrongs are part of the, um, adventure.

[UPDATE: NONE LEFT OF YANNIC!] If you want one of these 4-packs of YANNIC, they are available for $5 and would need to be picked up tomorrow (Thursday 8th July) in the Melbourne CBD between 3.00pm and 5.00pm only. First in best dressed, so email me before 12noon Thursday using the contact page to reserve yours.

I'll also throw in one of the sad orange ones — remember beauty is only skin deep, but tastiness is divine. Ehem.

If anyone really loves the idea of the orange ones, I'll do some packs of three for a meagre $1. [UPDATE: NONE LEFT!] You need to like the bitter orange character of marmelade (it's definitely not over the top, but I know that marmelade is often a love-it-or-hate-it thing for people).

And hopefully, hopefully, this'll be the last of the test runs! At present I'm looking at packaging and also how to make the macarons available, as supplying wholesale to retailers is too time-consuming at the moment and rarely rewarding. My focus is on small production to make this manageable, to keep the joy in it, and to have the emphasis on a tight, varying range of interesting flavours. There are still many steps to be negotiated, so stay tuned.

PS: And edible glitter is a real pain to deposit as a Macarons by Duncan trademark dot on the shells. Won't try that again!

For those of you who liked Yannic, brown and a tad salty, stay tuned for more news later today. All going well, a bit of Yannic will be obtainable tomorrow.

It's with heavy heart that I announce that macaron production has already drawn to a close, at least for now. The technical constraints of a small, busy commercial kitchen have turned out to be too great for regular, high-quality patisserie work. While I know some people will miss my macarons, remember that Jackie and Simon at EARL Canteen will of course be serving customers lots of other great food from their menu! They have an impressive dining concept and I wish them success.

As mentioned on my article about the macaron project, Jackie's interest and enthusiasm was instrumental in persuading me to start macaron production, so it is sad that things have had to wind up so soon. Supplies of macarons at EARL Canteen will probably last for a few weeks after the date of this announcement, but check with them if you want to know if a specific flavour is on sale on a certain day.

I'm off very soon for a short (but long-planned) holiday and when I return I'll explore options for making this project work in another context.

Thanks for your overwhelming enthusiasm for my product (especially those Twittererers out there!). I put a lot of care into trying to deliver flavours that were interesting and well executed, and I'm glad so many people enjoyed them. Perhaps there'll be more eventually!