Macaron Cooking Class

Australia (and I’m sure other countries too) is seriously obsessed with French macarons at the moment. It’s a sweet meringue based confectionery that has been around since the early 20^th century but recently made popular again by tv cooking shows like Master Chef. Since it exploded on our tv sets restaurants, cafes, bakeries have been offering the delicious desert on their menu and charging a fortune for these little bite size goodness.

So while in Paris, the home of the French macaron, I knew we had to attend a cooking class!!

I found La Cuisine Cooking Class online and I chose them because other cooking schools/classes were booked out for the period of time we would be in Paris. The plus side however was their office was a close walk from Notre Dame Church so we were able to walk from our apartment straight to their offices.

La Cuisine – French MacaronCooking Class

Duration: 2 hours

Cost: 85E per person

Feedback of the overall experience:

·      There were serious cooks who attend these classes to learn valuable information and techniques. I should have been prepared for this as there were students who dominated the teacher’s time and attention without caring about everyone else.

·      The allocated time frame, 2hrs was not enough time to really absorb and learn the whole process. I learning complicated processes as part of my job and usually process is verbally explained to me yet I felt this practical class didn’t provide me with the confidence I needed to go away and make my own macarons. I suggest they either allocate longer cooking class time or make classes even smaller maximum of 5 people, we had 9 people in our class.

·      Teacher / chef was lovely and very polite. She provided lots of information, was very helpful, engaging and provided lots of interesting facts about the history and process of making macarons. Teacher encouraged everyone to get involved int the cooking process by allocating tasks to specific people.

·      Staff were also very polite and welcoming

·      At the end of the class macarons are distributed evenly so everyone got to take home an equal amount of macarons in colours and flavours from everyone’s tray. So it doesn’t matter if your one looks the worst you’re off loading some of them to other people and getting some prettier ones in return.

Would I do a class again? Yes. Would I do it with this company? Probably not. I would actually recommend being taught one on one or one on three with a pastry chef. You’d get more valuable lessons learnt from a more intimate class. 

The final product