I promised to share my results with making French macarons (cookies) at home in a previous post. I’m trying to make authentic (and delicious) macarons and that's not so easy. Trust me.
First of all, you have to know what you are looking for. For each macaron cookie, you need to use two meringue-like rounds, made with ground almonds, sugar and egg whites. (There is no coconut in the French macarons.) The rounds should be under two inches in diameter but larger than 1½ inches in diameter. They need to be slightly rounded and smooth on top. There should be a dry, thin layer of meringue at the top of each round when you bit into it but the middle of each round should be a bit chewy. The middles should never be hollow. Oh, and they must have les "feet"—non? Oui! As the cookies rise when they bake, they get a sort of ruffled look at the bottom and this is very necessary. When you have finally mastered the meringue part of these cookies, you put two of them together with a yummy filling. There—you have it.
First I tried this recipe. I used some special almond poudre (powder) that my freind Barbie brought back from Paris for me. I've always thought that this was an essential ingredient for macarons and knew that it wasn't available in the U.S. Fortunately, I found out that you can make perfectly good macarons without this special powder.
Most recipes suggest sifting the powdered sugar and the ground almonds. This gets rid of the lumps and any large pieces.
After drying the almond powder with the powdered sugar overnight, I added the egg whites to it. It looks like almond paste.
For this recipe, you make an Italian meringue which is like making divinty. It is necessary to bring a mixture of sugar and water to 250°F and then pour this hot syrup into beaten egg whites.
Then add a small portion of the meringue into the almond paste. Add the rest of the meringue, then beat with spatula until fully mixed. When finished, pipe onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or on a Silpat baking mat. I could tell that this recipe wasn't going to work, right away. The meringue mixture was very fluid and it ran out of the piping tip.
After they were baked, they remained flat. No good—so into the garbage they went.
After the disaster above, I tried this French Chocolate Macaron recipe from David Lebovitz. David, je vous aime! You don’t need two days to make this recipe. The other good thing about these maracons is that not only are the filled with a chocolate ganache but the macarons themselves are chocolate. And for me, it doesn’t get much better than that.
Spoon the meringue mixture into a pastry bag with a 1/2-inch pasty tip. If there is no one around when you are doing this, place the bag into a water glass for support.
This time, I probably beat the egg whites too much. They stayed very stiff even after I folded in the dry ingredients. As a result, my macarons looked like little Chinese hats. I thought they might round out during baking.
Here are what they looked like after baking. I like using these Silpat non-stick baking mats becasue they are sturdy and washable unlike the parchment paper. And also, they are made in France as you can see.
I love those little feet but not the pointed tops. Supposedly, you can pat the beaks/peaks down with your fingers (dipped in water) but I didn't know that when I made this batch of them.
I made the chocolate gananche filling and filled them anyway. Not perfect yet, but they were delicious.
If you don't want to go to the trouble of making them, here are some macarons you can buy online at Cacao Assorted Macarons, French Macaroon 24 piece and Assorted French Macaroons.