5th January 2026.
The week we learnt that macarons don’t enjoy the snow.
Let’s start at the beginning, the first week of the year. Once Christmas and new year have been and gone it’s a chance for us to recover, take a breath and start to build our stock back up. Which is exactly where we thought we’d be this week. Here in the kitchen we’ve got lots to do but there’s not the sense of urgency there was a few weeks ago. There has however been two big differences this week compared to any other week…
The biggest change was one of our members of staff had her last day before maternity leave last Friday. We said goodbye with mixed feelings of excitement for her and sadness that we won’t have her with us. But her plan is to visit and she will be back! This meant Monday started with interviews and although it may be quieter in January we will soon need the extra hands by the time Valentine’s Day comes around.
The second difference has been the snow. We’re based in Norwich and snow fell last Friday night and was here through till Wednesday. This brought beautiful views across the city, but also travel chaos, a freezing kitchen, meaning the heaters (and kettle) were working overtime to heat our large, high ceilinged warehouse kitchen and we believe it also affected our macaron shells. They are sensitive to temperature and humidity and we had several trays of shells that turned into what we call ski slopes! They collapse slightly on one side causing a slope, still tasty and can be repurposed, but they are not great for the perfect macaron, which is of course what we strive for. Any shell that isn’t used in a macaron is dried out and blended into a dust. Then we use the dust to coat Cake Truffles and to sprinkle on top of our Celebration Cakes.
From a baking point of view, it was a mostly a classic macaron week, we made a batch each day:
- Monday was Blackcurrant,
- Tuesday was Lavender,
- Wednesday was Caramelised White Chocolate
- and Thursday was Cookies & Cream.
The challenge came on Friday. We still had a large amount of cream cheese in stock, an ingredient we bought for one of our Christmas specials: Cinnamon Bun. To save wasting it did we a) make more and continue selling this seasonal flavour through January or b) develop a new recipe to use up the cheese before it expired. And there was an overwhelming majority team vote: keep making Cinnamon Bun. It’s been a staff favourite this year and as it’s not overly ‘festive’ we should keep it! So Friday comes around and we have enough cream cheese to make half a batch of Cinnamon Bun Macarons. We continued with weighing out a full sized batch and sprinkle half of the white macaron shells with cinnamon and the other half with crushed hazelnuts to turn them into Praline Macarons.
Elsewhere in the kitchen it has been quiet for brownie making but business as usual for making Celebration Cakes - birthdays and celebrations don’t stop in January. In fact we had a slight rush on making an 8” Cookies & Cream Cake. A customer ordered their cake for the week after by mistake. Luckily we were able to rearrange our schedule last minute to fit in making their cake. Cake truffles have been in production, so has Peanut Brittle and the Ganache Cookies that we sell in our Norwich shop.
There’s also been something new in production, we’ve been trying out a new fruit and nut bar which is certainly what conversation has circled around amongst us all this week (other than the snow of course). The idea was brought to us by one of our kitchen team and she has developed the recipe to suit our kitchen rather than a home kitchen and made the first batch. This was only the first trial, so we’ll keep you posted when it’s ready to sample in our Norwich shop! It will fit alongside our Cococabana, Bananarama and Gold bars and the plan is for it not to contain any dairy or gluten containing ingredients.
Come back soon to read more!
Best wishes,
Rose