{"id":10,"date":"2012-12-02T20:07:24","date_gmt":"2012-12-02T19:07:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/Siti\/roadtopastry\/?p=4"},"modified":"2012-12-11T13:41:39","modified_gmt":"2012-12-11T12:41:39","slug":"competition-the-best-amateur-macaron-of-nice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roadtopastry.com\/blog\/events\/competition-the-best-amateur-macaron-of-nice","title":{"rendered":"Competition: The best amateur macaron of Nice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seven of the best pastry chefs in France<\/strong> have organised in seven cities a competition<\/strong> to find the best amateur macaron<\/strong> of France, the “Concours du meilleur macaron”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Was there any chance that I did not participate? Of course not<\/strong> and so I registered as soon as possible for the local contest in Nice<\/strong>, organised by my favourite pastry chef in the region, Pascal Lac<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The challenge:<\/strong><\/em> creating 10 sweet macarons of the same size<\/strong> at home and bringing them to any of the Lac P\u00e2tisseries in Nice on Saturday December 1st before noon.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Every respectable amateur pastry chef should know that macarons are damn hard to make!<\/strong>
\nAnd I struggled for 3 weeks trying to make them<\/strong>, attempting almost every day (and failing constantly<\/strong>).<\/p>\n

Apparently the problem was with the cooking time<\/strong>: only the day before the contest was I able to make decent macarons by leaving them in the oven longer than suggested<\/strong> by any recipe I had seen (19 minutes instead of 12 on average, it is a huge difference!).<\/p>\n

\"My<\/a>I made about a hundred macaron shells<\/strong> to minimize the risk of failure: it proved to be a wise choice since more than half of them didn’t come out of the oven well<\/strong> (i.e. they cracked, damn them!) and I could not use them for the competition.<\/p>\n

Then, finally, I made the filling<\/strong> and it was amazing (modestly)<\/em>: on one side, a chocolate ganache<\/strong> with 70% chocolate, cream and butter; on the other side, a caramel banana “compote” with rhum, orange, cinnamon, star anise, and dried raisins<\/strong> (recipe to come in another post). You can imagine I was full of expectations and eager to know the results of the competition.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The best part of the competition was the event held on Saturday in the afternoon in the majestic hotel Le Negresco<\/strong>, probably Nice’s best hotel<\/strong> and certainly the most famous (its dome is one of the symbols of the city).<\/p>\n

If you think it’s fancy from the outside, look at the inside…
\n\"The<\/a>Nice, uh? So, the jury voted in the early afternoon (my yellow macarons are the first one the bottom on the left… and I’ve discovered from other pics on Facebook that they were a bit too soggy perhaps!) \ud83d\ude41\"\"<\/a>And then the room at Le Negresco<\/strong> in Nice got packed with people. Of course not everybody was there for our competition: Pascal Lac<\/strong> was presenting his amazing Christmas collection<\/a> of chocolates, b\u00fbches and cakes<\/strong>… \"\"<\/a>B\u00fbches<\/strong>… like this, for example (wow):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>At 6pm, finally, it was time for the long-awaited award ceremony<\/strong> (the Champagne made the wait easier to bear).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Pascal Lac himself presented the star-filled jury<\/strong> (among them S\u00e9bastien Bouillet, Christophe Calderon, and Denis Matyasy), and thanked and presented all the participants one by one,<\/strong> keeping the best three for last, of course.<\/p>\n

As he called my name, I understood I was not one of the winners<\/strong> unfortunately \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>(Photos from Lac’s Facebook page)<\/p>\n

The good thing is that at least the consolation prize<\/strong> included some chocolates from Lac, and they are delicious<\/em>!<\/p>\n

And now, the winners…<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>From left to right:<\/p>\n

#1 – Macaron with candied orange zests<\/strong>
\n#2 – Macaron with mint, poached pear and chocolate<\/strong>
\n#3 – Macaron with mango, cardamom, chocolate, and Tonka beans<\/strong> (French amateurs are very advanced and like using ingredients that you might never have heard of) \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Congratulations to the winners… too bad I was not among them, but this competition surely helped me improve my macaron technique, learn a lot, and it was a great experience! Bring on the next one! \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seven of the best pastry chefs in France have organised in seven cities a competition to find the best amateur macaron of France, the “Concours du meilleur macaron”. Was there any chance that I did not participate? Of course not and so I registered as soon as possible for the local contest in Nice, organised<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[7,8,9,664,11,12],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","tag-competition","tag-concours-du-meilleur-macaron","tag-le-negresco","tag-macarons","tag-nice","tag-pascal-lac"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roadtopastry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roadtopastry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roadtopastry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roadtopastry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roadtopastry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roadtopastry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roadtopastry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roadtopastry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roadtopastry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roadtopastry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}