Adventures in making French macarons

When I was in middle school and high school, I used to make a lot of pastry. Chocolates (especially with griottes), cakes ...
I also happened to live near a very fancy Parisian pastry shop. The Pierre Hermé shop famously makes macarons that are hard to beat : they are very delicate, fresh and their fillings are subtle and original (but with a matching price tag !...).

The store also sold the Macarons book by Pierre Hermé (French), which is (unsurprisingly) a great resource on the subject.

So at some point, I decided I needed to try my hand at it...
About a thousand macarons later, I had a reasonable grasp of the fundamentals and I could make decent macarons, both big (30cm) and small.

Around the same time in high school, I was lucky enough to teach some private math lessons. This allowed me to buy my first camera, a Canon 5D MkII which was very popular at the time for indie film making.

I had the project of making a video on macarons inspired by the "From Bone to Satellite" scene from 2001 : A Space Odyssey :

I teamed up with my photographer friend Gregory Gaydu and we filmed everything in one afternoon + night, at some friends' place. We did have a few issues at the end of the shooting, since everybody was stealing (many!) macarons while we were changing camera angles...

In the end, I could not do the "spatula launched in the air transforming into a stand mixer" shot, despite many attempts. I bet they used very long telephoto lenses in the movie, and our set did not allow for it.

I spent quite a few nights editing the video. Obviously, the quality suffers from the lack of preparations and the "we can only do one take because I did not make enough dough" approach, but I am still quite satisfied with this fun little video :

Note : To the great dismay of my friends and family, I stopped making macarons when I finished high school.