Friday Food: Rustic, Delicious Macarons from W. Margaron

Rustic, full of character and flavor and sourced from local ingredients, macarons from Margaret Waterhouse and her company, W. Margarone are a wonderful gift.   Listen to her interview on KFBK below.   

The KFBK staff favorites are: 

- Salted Caramel

- Coconut Cream Salted Caramel (dairy free)

- Chocolate Orange (December only)

- Ginger Molasses (December only)

E-mail to order here.

Margaret shares this about herself:

• My  first influence was my family, I started baking with my mom very young  and took over baking the seasonal Christmas cookies by the time I was of  middle school age.

• My  dad’s career as a Professor of Winemaking at UC Davis exposed me to Slow  Food Yolo, the Farm to Fork movement as well as the flavors of abroad  (we traveled with him or he brought treats home) throughout my childhood. He also introduced me to macarons, before  the craze in the US, and that first taste sparked a lasting fascination  (that I would later pick up at the end of high school when I made my  first batch).

• I am  self-taught when it comes to baking, but I did spend 6 months in France  when I was 18 travelling and volunteering on farms. This exposed me not  only to French baking, cooking and cuisine, but the culture and sensibility of food that comes out of small  farms/rural communities: eat what’s truly in season, grown or raised by  yourself or neighbors, or forage for truly fresh, vibrant foods and make  simple preparations that simple reveal or elevate the quality of what you have.

• I’ve  worked on numerous small, organic farms and in food production from  vegetables and berries to raw milk to slaughtering and butchering and  have also practiced at several times in my life the concept of eating only what is local and seasonal.

• I’ve  baked macarons for 10 years now and have slowly adapted a traditional  approach to my own recipe to emphasis flavor, texture and whole food  ingredients.

• I  love macarons because I see them as a blank canvas (kind of like a  pizza) where you have a basic form that you can fill with any  ingredients of flavors you want and when you strike the right balance of flavor and texture combinations, you end up with something  beyond the ordinary.