Baroque Macarons

thanks sabina and ophelia! 

yay, baroque macarons, late birthday present, but as i always say, it's the thought that counts. this completes the three places of macarons i wanted to try the most (:

jasmine and white choc, pistachio and sour cherry, strawberry and poppy seed, rosewater and buttercream, passionfruit and milk choc, dark chocolate, salted caramel

strawberry-i would have liked more strawberry flavour. very subtle. poppy seeds were cute. the ganache inside was kind of transparent, but not like a jelly centre.

passionfruit-you could taste the passionfruit, but it wasn't as strong as zumbo's packet mix. the milk choc was surprisingly not sweet, just good quality milk choc.

pistachio-i love that purple glitter on top! just like a real pistachio, the outside skin is purple, then green, and when you bite into it it's yellow-ish. couldn't taste the sour cherry, and a quarter of one shell was hollow.

jasmine-subtle flavour again. you could taste the white choc. most disappointed with this since both shells were half hollow. this one wasn't evenly sandwich with ganache, so it toppled a bit inside the box.

rosewater-i think this was the best overall. good flavour, strong fragance. i think the butter cream was a bit heavy on the butter, but at least it had good flavour. 

salted caramel-really loved this flavour. not as salted as other places, but the caramel was good. this would've been my overall flavour if not a quarter of one shell wasn't hollow.

tbh, it was ok. the texture wasn't as nice as laduree, and the flavour is not intense enough, especially compared to zumbo's. sweetness and flavour intensity are two different things, something can be flavourful without being super sweet. for something so small, i like it to be more flavourful and perhaps a tad sweeter.

the most annoying thing is the box, especially compared to the other places. zumbo's 6 macarons fitted PERFECTLY (i actually accidently squished one whilst pulling the box out, even the box was a tight fit), laduree was also a good fit, not as tight so you could still pick one out of the box without trouble. the baroque 7 pack box is a bit awkward. there's this gap which you can fit only half a macaron if you squished the others, but not eight, so you could feel the macarons move a bit inside the box. the width of the box was also bigger than the macarons, and it was deeper, so taking nice photos was a bit trickier. i saw some bloggers post that they had macaron machines at baroque, hope that's not the case. each macaron did have perfect feet/height...

free tea came! just go oz bargain to find the link. i was a bit weary about putting in my address, but meh, free tea (: nek minnit it turns out my mum already bought two boxes of lipton pyramid tea...

went to Yummy Chinese BBQ for lunch with mum/cousin. it's normally 20bucks, but they did a promotion so now it's 12.80, and with the group on it was $10pp, so technically didn't save a lot. they said they were booked out on sat until sept, which is the end of the deal, but they probably only booked about 4 tables, and the other tables were for full priced customers. going to stay away from group on booking things for a long time. also, that's one of the main reasons i refuse to buy hatted restaurants group on because 1. it's going to be super hard to book a good time (ie weekends) 2. quality is going to be a bit worse 3. portions will be smaller (and hatted restaurants already have smaller portions)

i don't recommend this place. not all the food was hot enough, some skewers were luke warm, until half way through the guy put more effort in and they came out hot. it's supposed to be diy bbq, but since we went on a weekday, they did it. some chilli dishes i couldn't have. i ate sooo much though. over 12 skewers, and heaps of other stuff. their ice cream was horrible, so was their cake. actually, hardly anything was good, but it was cheap and filling, and i didn't even eat dinner/supper at PLUS (youth group) at night. i now fully understand why my dad hates buffets. what is the point of "abusing/stuffing" your body with so much food at one time? it doesn't feel good physically/mentally. unless you go high class buffets, which i've only been to about two in hk. feeling so unhealthy, since i went out to eat last night.