The birthday that keeps on giving!

Well, it’s Friday the 13th…spooooky. But instead of being superstitious, my parents decided to hop a plane from Texas to celebrate my birthday tomorrow!

To welcome them to the D.C. metro area, I whipped up another batch of chocolate macarons.

My folks have never tried them before, considering they live very far away from the maker of the macaron, so I wanted to give them a chance to taste.

I made another batch day before yesterday for my friend Rob (as a pre-thank you for this amazing birthday gift:)

26 different gifts, all of which will be used over the next…oh…year? Included were dutch process cocoa powder (score!) and “burgundy” (maroon, for you Aggies) gel paste, which I will use for Aggie Cupcakes (you know it) and which I used to brighten the color of these bad boys.

In addition to the fantastically thoughtful gift, Rob also made me a birthday treat:

which was gobbled up (except for the top, to show my folks) by my officemates and duly enjoyed.

So, needless to say, my sweet tooth isn’t all that … hungry, but nevertheless, I persevered in the name of baking. I know, I’m so selfless sometimes.

These are chocolate cookie with alternating caramel and chocolate ganache fillings. Totally traditional, totally heavenly. In the future I think I’ll try to do a combo choco-caramel filling for these, and I’m also planning on trying out a “nutella” recipe, involving hazelnuts and chocolate.

My roommate’s cat was particularly interested in the photoshoot.

I also caught a great post from the Brown Eyed Baker on food photography, so I wanted to try out some of the camera settings she recommended. I adjusted the white balance, waited for daylight (not much of it on this gray Friday morning), and used different staging.

And now, I give you: macaron montage.

Enjoy, everyone! I’ll have a good review of Central Michel Richard later on this weekend. I’m so excited to go to this restaurant, which is related to Citronelle (faaaaaancy). The menu looks phenom, and the space is really cool-looking.

Tomorrow we’ll be hitting up the Virginia wine country, so keep an eye out for shots from there too! And we may hit up Masa 14, a cool new tequila bar, as my folks are such tequila lovers. Have a great weekend, everyone!

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