Paris, My Sweet by Amy Thomas Page B

BlackBerry. She was already shifting to Plan B.
    â€œYou know, I’d love to, but a massive wave of jet lag just washed over me,” I begged. “I think I’d fall asleep in my spaetzle if I stayed out.” It was true that I was still a bit woozy from jet lag. But I knew I’d return to my apartment for another sleepless night, no matter how tired I was. More than anything, I just didn’t want to feel alienated any more. Everything I had once known and loved suddenly felt so foreign and I no longer knew where I belonged. This night that I had been deliciously anticipating had taken it out of me. I needed it to end.

    Walking around the neon-filled avenues and crowded streets in the ensuing days, I found myself having a mini identity crisis. So many of my friends, including AJ—who was back from her business trip and on for dinner that night—were moving in with boyfriends, and moving out to Brooklyn. Out of my entire community of New York friends, only a handful were still in the same place as me: single and living the life of a twentysomething. Cohabitation in Park Slope or Carroll Gardens was apparently the modern fairy tale of my peers, not whooping it up in a foreign country. I kept pondering where all these observations left me: with two homes, or none? Was I a New Yorker or a Parisian? Expat or local? Where exactly did I belong? As I searched for the connection to and love for a city that had always sustained me, I felt sad and alienated.
    I also felt guilty on a more existential level. It was like realizing that you’ve fallen out of love with someone. Each morning, I’d wake up, hoping to feel differently, thinking but, but, but…I used to love this place. I used to look forward to this. This used to be my life . Now I felt bad because I couldn’t get excited about something that I once loved so much. I couldn’t help but see New York as loud and filthy instead of elegant and transporting. The tarted-up Sex and the City wannabes tottering in high heels and shockingly short skirts had none of the grace of French women who walked with a confident, sophisticated gait. The urban grit and tension felt claustrophobic, not inspiring the way Paris’s cobblestone streets and plazas did.
    It didn’t help that as soon as I’d start feeling a New York connection again, I’d be ushered back to Paris. For just as the French were having a love affair with cupcakes, I discovered New Yorkers were falling for the macaron.

    Ah yes, macarons. Those crisp but chewy, light-as-air meringue cookies. Not the big, hulking lumpish Italian confections that are often made with coconut. French macarons are different. They’re delicate yet persnickety. A feat of mixing, folding, stirring, and timing. A delightful combination of powdered sugar, finely ground almonds, and egg whites and not much else, save for the luxuriously creamy ganache or buttercream filling that holds the two cookies together. Firm but tender, shiny yet ridged, with ethereally light shells and heavy middles, they’re miniature studies of contrasts—and deliciousness.
    Making macarons is famously difficult. Everything must be done just so: the ingredients measured to the very gram, egg whites aged and beaten on a rigid timetable, ovens heated to the precise degree—even the outside weather conditions can result in flat or cracked shells, instead of the shiny, perfectly domed specimens that beckon from pâtisserie vitrines and tea house cake stands. “Humidity is the enemy of macarons,” is how the instructor explained it in a macaron-making class I took. (You better believe I took a macaron-making class. I figured with those things being as iconic to the Frenchies as cupcakes were to Americans, the least I could do was see what all the fuss was about. I spent a few hours on a Saturday, learning at La Cuisine Paris.)
    If you don’t stir the batter enough, you get spiky cookies. If