The Year in Review

It's that time of the year, for saccharine lookings-back to the year that was.

For many, 2009 was the year of the hoax. The screw-up. The year that our confidence in money, luxury, success and all that we hold dear was, if not shattered, then at least shaken very badly.

GFC. Tiger Woods. Balloon Boy. Madoff.

But for me - 2009 was the year of the macaron.
For the uninitiated, let me do the Wikipedia-ing for you. Macarons are a traditional French pastry, made of egg whites, sugar and almond powder. Two crunchy meringue like bits, sandwich a layer of ganache. The colours and flavours of the macaron are only limited by your imagination, as Adriano Zumbo rightly showed us on his birthday.

So when did this French piece of puffery become so entrenched in our cheesecake-eating, ice-cream- swilling dessert culture? It seems as if the macaron snuck up on us, and cast a very long shadow on our culinary landscape. So here's a look at some of the masters.

First up is the inventor of the modern macaron, Ladurée, located in Paris, where again, according to Wikipedia, 15,000 of these babies are sold everyday. There is also a shop in Tokyo which, in the name of research, I'll be hitting up in February.

These are the creations of Sadaharu Aoki, a Parisian-trained Japanese patissier, whose matcha opera cake has received huge accolades. I have actually had these before, and the flavour of the ganache is quite intense.

The mighty ispahan

Pierre Hermé's signature creation, the ispahan, is a concotion of rosewater flavoured meringue cookies sandwiching lychee cream and fresh raspberries. Again, I have had the pleasure of tasting this, and the tartness and texture of the raspberries really offsets the sweetness and floral scents in the cookies.
And lastly, our home-grown hero, Adriano Zumbo - who had a macaron bonanza on his birthday this year, making 60 different flavours including cheeseburger, maple syrup, bacon and pancake (that was one flavour), black truffle and beer 'n' peanuts. Alas, I was not able to attend the event, but a more detailed catalogue of the flavours are here, at Grab Your Fork.

So, will the macaron be here to stay in 2010? Only time will tell...