[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!