New Macaron flavors at La Bonne Vie

Starting this year (which was already 3 1/2 months ago...), I've been introducing new macaron flavors each month....so-called "flavor of the month".  I'm hoping this will encourage customers to stop by more often (at least once a month) to check out our new macaron flavor and other new pastry items.

...And also prevent my partner and I from getting bored making the same old pastries and mac flavors all the time.  Trust me, making several batches of the same flavors every single day gets old pretty quickly.

For January's flavor of the month...

Rose macaron.  Dusty rose-colored shells filled with rose mousseline, which is a mixture of pastry cream and buttercream, flavored with rose water.  I've always wanted to create a rose-flavored macaron at some point, so am pretty happy with this one.  It also got rave reviews, and (supposedly) flew off the shelves, with the store manager demanding that I keep the flavor and not discontinue it for the next month.

But of course, I ignored her. ;)

For February, visions of chocolates, hearts, cupids, and everything in shades of red and pink comes to mind...

Red Velvet macarons.  Red cocoa shells filled with chocolate buttercream (or ganache, whichever was available).  We actually made these last year during the month of February, except they had cream cheese filling instead of the chocolate.

For March, in honor of St. Paddy's Day, the shell needed to be in the shade of green.  I was planning on doing either a chocolate-mint or key lime...then chef got into my face and (pretty much) demanded that I make jasmine macarons.  Cuz, you know, jasmine is green... (...wtf????)

So I had to come up with a filling that tasted like jasmine.  At first, I thought about infusing yuzu cremeux with jasmine tea bags, but that would require an ungodly amount of jasmine tea, which can be a bit expensive.  So I bought an imitation jasmine flavoring (very cheap stuff) at a local Chinese market, and used the rose mousseline recipe.  Unfortunately, by itself, the cream tasted too much like hand cream, so I had to add another flavor to balance it out....

...And discovered that mango and jasmine meld very well together.  The sweet, fruity flavor of the mango mellows the intense floral note of the jasmine.  The jasmine-mango macs don't seem to be as popular as the rose, but we'll be switching out the flavor in a couple of weeks, so I'm not too worried.

Work has been busy, and pregnancy is definitely sapping me of whatever energy I have left after work...but hopefully, I can update my blog a bit more often than, say, every few months. :P