Week 24: Macarons

Macarons

This was the weekend we have been waiting for! We have re-scheduled them several times and continued to push them back another week. We were finally going to have time to make them a few weeks ago. We had planned to use our Memorial Day weekend to finally get them done, but, Aubrey’s new job threw that plan out the window! At long last, we decided that we were going to get them made this weekend no matter how long it took to do it!

The macaron is often confused with a macaroon, or at least pronounced the same. Macaroons (pronounced mack-a-roon) are an American creation made with shredded coconut and sometimes dipped in chocolate. Macarons (pronounced mac-a-rohn), made famous by the French, are elegant meringue sandwich cookies filled with buttercream, ganache or jam. You can’t look at a cooking magazine or a cooking website these days and NOT see a macaron somewhere! They are the seemingly ubiquitous dessert served at weddings, showers, graduations, and all forms of dinner parties. They come in just about any color and flavor you can imagine so who can blame us for loving them for both their looks and their taste! They always make me think of the “pretty patties” episode of SpongeBob.

We originally planned to make 4 flavors using two different cookies. A chocolate cookie would give us the base for a Reese’s and a s’mores macaron while a “vanilla” cookie would be the base for crème de menthe and lemon flavors. Vanilla is in quotes because there is no vanilla in the actual cookie so it isn’t really a vanilla cookie. Our plans changed a bit when neither batch turned out! We were left with some pretty sad cooked disks…note, I did not say cookies. We had nothing to fill! So, we decided that we had to try one more time, find a new recipe and follow it as written. For the sake of time, we reduced our expectations and settled on one flavor of cookie. We really just wanted to have some cookies that needed filling!

Normally, I would explain our substitutions about now, but, after two dismal failures, I’m going to inform you DO NOT USE SUGAR SUBSTITUES! 🙂 We used a Taste Of Home recipe for our third try and did not make any substitutions! I left some of their links in the instructions just in case you need more information.

Ingredients

• 1-1/3 cups almond flour (125 grams)
• 2-1/4 cups confectioners’ sugar (225 grams), divided 
• 3 extra large egg whites (100 grams), room temperature  
• 2 tablespoons superfine sugar (25 grams)
• 1/8 teaspoon salt

Directions

1. Place the almond flour and 1-1/2 cups plus 3 Tbsp. (175 grams) confectioners’ sugar into the bowl of a food processor and pulse until the ingredients are thoroughly mixed. The goal is to have the almond flour reach a very fine consistency. To ensure this, pass the almond flour through a fine-mesh sieve. Toss any of the large pieces that won’t pass through.
2. Double check to make sure your egg whites are at room temperature (yes, it’s important!), then, place them and the salt in a very clean bowl of a stand mixer. Using the whisk attachment, whisk the ingredients on medium-low speed until the whites look frothy. Slowly add superfine sugar and continue to whisk until dissolved. This will take about 1-2 minutes.
3. Next, gradually add the remaining confectioners’ sugar (50 grams) and increase the speed to high for 2-3 minutes. Here’s where the meringue magic kicks in; you’ll know it’s ready when the mix is glossy and stiff peaks form. Check out our explainer guide for perfectly stiff-peaked meringue.
4. When combining ingredients, treat your meringue as if it’s a prized possession. The goal here is to hold on to as much of that fluffy air you’ve built up as possible while ensuring that ingredients are evenly mixed. Sound impossible? Read our guide for how to fold ingredients for best-ever baking.
5. That being said, gently fold 1/3 of the almond flour mixture into the meringue, then fold in the remaining almond flour in two additions.
6. Once the ingredients start to come together, aim to eliminate any air bubbles from the mix. This will ensure the macarons look clean and smooth. Using the side of a spatula, smooth batter up sides of bowl several times to ensure there are no lumps.
7. Fit a #7 or #10 round pastry tip inside a pastry bag and gently pour batter inside. Remember to handle it with care! Pipe rounds that are a smidge under 1-1/2 inches onto parchment paper about 1 inch apart. These will form the two halves of your macaron.
8. Gently lift the tray and tap it against the counter a few times to remove excess air bubbles.
9. Now is a good time to get the oven ready. Position the rack to the upper third position and preheat to 300°. For an involved recipe like this, it’s good to check that your oven is properly calibrated. Double-check this list to make sure your oven is working its best.
10. Despite all this oven talk, refrain from popping your macarons into the oven straight away. Allow the macarons to rest for 30-60 minutes, until the surface is no longer sticky or wet. A thin skin will form on the top of the piped batter and you should be able to run your finger lightly over the top when they’re ready to bake.
11. At long last, it’s bake time! Bake the macarons, one tray at a time, for 14-16 minutes. Rotate the tray halfway through cooking. The cookies should rise about 1/8 inch to form “feet.”
12. When they’re ready, remove the tray and let the cookies cool completely. Once the macarons have completely cooled, remove them from the parchment paper. They should lift right off.
13. Once cooled, make a sandwich with two cookies filled with frosting like buttercream, jam, marshmallow fluff, or a ganache. Put the frosting into a pastry bag fitted with a small round tip and pipe buttercream onto half of the macarons. Top with remaining macaron shells.

For our frosting, we still wanted a few flavors but had zero time to make several batches not to mention, who needs 3 recipes of buttercream for a handful of macarons. See the link later for a recipe that is similar to what we used.

Our Experience

Let’s start with our initial failures. We used regular sugar to make our meringues but thought, why not try the substitutes for the rest of it. We can’t be certain, but we are pretty sure the substitutes caused the sad, sad state we found ourselves in after a few hours of baking! They couldn’t even be used! The cookies are supposed to slide right off the parchment paper and we had to pry them off.

I didn’t even take a picture of the chocolate ones, but they looked the same. The sad thing is they had good flavor, just unusable.

It was late when we decided we had to try again. So, we didn’t feel like we took as many “during” photos but we made up for it with the after photos (yes, we were really proud of ourselves). We followed the recipe to a T this time around! For this recipe, it is highly recommended to use a scale for measuring your ingredients…yes, it’s that easy to mess them up. We started with mixing the almond flour and sugar together in a food processor and then sifting it through a sieve. This is the finest one we have other than a small hand held one that would have taken all night to sift!

The next step was whipping the egg whites. This really is the make or break step of macarons. We made sure the eggs were room temperature before starting (remember, it was already late so that took even more time).

This recipe was much more specific than the ones we previously used! This one specified to add the sugar slowly so we added the sugar slowly while we whipped the eggs and we were excited to see the stiff peak stage which we were never able to fully achieve using the previous recipe’s method.

We added the almond flour and sugar mixture in 3 separate batches and we carefully folded it in each time. We were so busy checking the batter that we failed to get any pictures. 🙁

I printed out some templates to use rather than purchasing special macaron silpats. These worked so we don’t think you need a special pan liner to make them.

We put parchment paper over the templates, piped the macarons, left them to sit for half an hour first, then removed the paper template. We were piping them pretty quickly and should have tried to make less of a “tail” on them, but we thought we would be able to smooth them out with a finger. Unfortunately, they were way too sticky to smooth out with a finger. They looked worse after our attempts to smooth them so we just stopped trying. (There’s probably a trick to doing it, we just didn’t have time to research.)

Once they dried out for about half an hour, we baked them as directed and they were amazing!! (To us any way!)

When macarons cook, they are supposed to create a “foot”. When they are baked the top shell layer of the macaron hardens and the macaron can no longer expand at the top and must rise up at the bottom, this forms a frilled ruffle or foot. If you do any reading about making macarons, you will learn that the foot is essential. If it doesn’t have one, it’s pretty much a failure. On our third attempt, we finally had feet AND volume! Yay, us.

We took a fair amount of time pairing the cookies up. We tried to match them up according to size and color. Even with the template, some were bigger and some smaller and we wanted them to be the same size on each side.

I made one batch of buttercream and divided it by 3 adding different ingredients at the appropriate stage to make three different flavors. I made a mint version that we colored green, a lemon version that we colored yellow, and the chocolate one with the addition of cocoa powder making it a nice chocolatey brown. We used a recipe in my Betty Crocker cookbook but found one online that is very similar. We chose it because it had variations that we could use to make a few different flavors using the same recipe. https://www.cooksrecipes.com/cake/basic-buttercream%20frosting-with-variations-recipe.html

What we liked.

These received a 5 out of 5. Everybody had a favorite flavor but we all liked all three flavors of them (although, I’m not certain Logan really liked the lemon or if she was being nice). If you’ve never eaten one, the cookie is has a thin, crisp exterior with a chewy center. They’re a cross between a meringue and an almond cookie. They are dainty and ours were really sweet. My favorite was the mint. The lemon one got a couple votes, chocolate got one, and the mint and chocolate were tied for Garrett. We actually appreciated the process of making them and we really enjoyed watching them bake to see if they were going to get feet. Since it took 3 tries, we were super excited when they finally looked like they were supposed to look, despite their lack of color! During each stage of making the 3rd batch, we knew they were different from the first two and felt positive we were finally on the right track.

One of the great things about these is that they can be any flavor and, other than changing the color, the cookies don’t necessarily have any specific flavor. We made 3 flavors with one cookie recipe. If we had had some time to decorate them, the cookies could have been unique to each macaron too.

What we would change.

Obviously, we would have made our first two with real sugar had we known they would fail without it. When we make them again we are definitely going to make them more colorful, besides the frosting. As for the frosting, it had great flavor but I thought it was too sweet. (Of course, I normally hate frosting…just too sweet!) I would like to try a filling that is less sweet than a buttercream. We had planned to make a lemon curd for the lemon ones but we had to give a few things up just to get them done. I think the lemon curd would have been delicious. I would like to try a whipped cream type frosting since it would be less sweet. And, in the future, I could actually make a sugar free filling since I can’t make the cookies sugar free!

The other item that still bugs me is the grainy texture of them. We used the super fine almond flour (Bob’s Red Mill which was recommended by several sites) and used the food processor as well, but the almonds were still bigger than we had expected and most likely the culprit for the grainy texture. I’m not sure what else we should do, but we will have to do a little research to see if there is a solution to our problem.

What we learned.

Big learning experience for us! We didn’t have macarons in any of our cookbooks so our original recipes were from some random blogs. Some of the directions were not as thorough as those from Taste of Home. So, always keep that in mind when getting recipes from the internet. A well known site is probably the safest to go to for recipes for items you have never made before. Especially items that are well known for being tricky to make. Or, at least take some time to compare recipes and processes before selecting a final one to use. While we were baking them, it was obvious that something wasn’t right…another lesson learned. Don’t waste time on a lost cause!

Our biggest issue was trying to use sugar substitutes in a meringue base. It is just one of those recipes that requires real sugar. I won’t do it again unless I figure out a product that will work. (Don’t worry, I am still going to sugar substitutes in recipes I have never made before, just not another meringue. 🙂 )

Until next week, Happy Baking!