maca-wrongs
The lemon luxury layer cake left me with an abundance of egg whites. About 13 of them. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try my hand at making some fancy pants macarons. I read Syrup and Tang’s fantastic guide to macaron techniques and troubleshooting and decided that the slightly more difficult Italian meringue or sucre cuit method was for me.
Never has the world seen such wrinkled, deformed little beasts claiming to be macarons.
The batter was too thin and so the act of putting them into the oven caused the circles I made to ooze into amoeba blobs and melting snowmen.
None of them developed feet. The ideal macaron also has a crispy shell and a soft meringue interior. My crispy shells were usually cracked and the interior had giant air bubbles with a dense layer of chewy batter at the bottom. All wrong.
And yet, strangely addictive to eat.
Maca-so-wrong-they’re-rights?
Maca-gones?
Maca-real-beauty-is-on-the-insides?
Maca-noms?
Help me out here.
Full feed
Hi there:) I wonder what went wrong for the batter to have been so wet (to that extent)? There’s often a need to adjust slightly, but not as much as this — was the meringue very stiff? Oh well, they would still have been tasty, yes?
I’m not entirely sure. I measured out all the ingredients with a scale. The egg whites beat up nicely but once I added the sugar syrup it collapsed. I kept whipping and it reached “compact and satiny” status but never gained the bird beak stiffness. More whipping didn’t seem to help so I just mixed in the almond batter and piped out the circles so as not to waste the ingredients I had. I’m not sure if I was too impatient and should have just kept beating until it stiffened up or if I messed up the sugar syrup somehow that caused it to never come together.
Hmm, if the sugar syrup was at the target temp, I’m not sure what might have happened — but the different consistency certainly explains the outcome. Best of luck for a second round!
I’m pretty sure everybody’s first attempt at macarons ends up in a total disaster. Mine did! I used one of tartelette’s recipes the 2nd time and they turned out pretty damn good.