Macaron Tower

September is a busy month birthday wise, as I am sure most people appreciate.  For me, across nine days there are nine birthdays (plus a few stragglers at the beginning and end of the month), with six of those falling on the 11th and 12th.  This year also happens to be the year all my friends from school are turning 30 (I am next year given I was the youngest of the group).  One of my friends, who you may remember from My Best Friend’s Wedding… Cake, decided to have a party for her 30th and I volunteered to make the cake.  M hadn’t decided what she wanted but when I told her that I was going to buy a macaron stand (US readers check out the Macaron section of my store for your link) that I had been eyeing off for a while, the decision was made.  M requested a macaron tower for her 30th birthday.

M has a twin brother and one of our other friends, B, also shares the same birthday, so when deciding what flavours to go on the tower, they all chose one.

M informed me straight away that hers would be my popcorn and malteser macarons as she could eat those things forever.  I had not made them in a while and I forgotten how much I loved them as well.  This time I also made them extra malty which just added to the love.

C decided his would be cherry ripe and in all honesty I had never eaten a cherry ripe before making these macarons.  Weird, I know.  But I suffered through and ate a few cherry ripes for the sake of figuring out the best way to make them.  In the end, I used a truckload of cherry ripes, and I will have the recipe for you in a future blog post.

The final choice was salted caramel from B.  In my test batch, the caramel had a slight burnt taste to it which was amazing.  However, I couldn’t quite get that to happen this time but the caramel still turned out delicious and was pretty popular.  Unfortunately, B wasn’t able to make it to the party after moving to another state recently but she won’t miss out…

The stand I purchased has 10 layers all up to hold 230ish macarons but I didn’t need to use them all as it was a smaller gathering.  I had 96 macarons to fill the tower and given the popcorn and malteser macarons take up a little extra room, all 96 didn’t fit on the layers I used.  Not that the extras went to waste as M and her hubby were quite happy to test them out.

Although the stand comes with its own base, we ended up setting the tower on the same stand as the wedding cake and it was the perfect size for the base layer.  It looked a million times better than it would have on the acrylic stand.

Excited is an understatement of how I felt when it was set up.  The colours looked really great together and the flavours were a hit with those at the party.

But most importantly, M and C loved it and even got an extra pack of their chosen flavour just in case they hadn’t eaten enough of them from the tower.