maca-rights
Oh look at that!
Maca-rights! No more maca-wrongs! Rejoice! I had yet another macaron failure with the Italian sucre cuit method before I decided to try my hand at the more temperamental French macaron. Maybe 5 years of French classes offered me a hidden advantage because I finally got properly textured macarons with feet instead of sad hollow shells that oozed into hideous almond amoebas.
Check it out baby. Two pairs of feet on each delightful cookie, a shell like crust, and a soft interior texture. I think I was botching the addition of the hot sugar syrup to the egg whites somehow and deflating my whites. With the French method I could really focus on getting my meringue to the right consistency and whisking the last bit by hand gave me even more control.
Judging by the troubleshooting pictures at Syrup and Tang, these aren’t quite perfect. The bottoms were ever so slightly sticky, which suggests that I managed to over-beat it a little. Maybe I can blame it on the high humidity today. Nonetheless, I’m declaring them a success. Once properly sandwiched into macarons, no one will be able to tell. By the way, the swirls on the shells were because I made two batches with different levels of coloring and didn’t clean out the piping bag. I think it adds a little something.
Before you get started baking macarons, you should read both of the excellent breakdowns at Syrup and Tang and Not So Humble Pie. I referred to both when making this batch.
The recipes offered at both vary only a hair in their ratios, the primary difference is what percentage of the sugar was used to stiffen the meringue and what percentage was mixed in at the end with the almond flour. I went with Mrs. Humble’s multipliers because 2x and .3x was easier to remember than 1.6 and 0.8 respectively.
I did lose a lot of the macarons at the edges of the sheet tray to cracking, but the center ones fared just fine. I place the blame for this with my tiny wall oven so future batches will be tweaked for oven time and temperature to see if I can resolve this.
Macarons
50 grams egg whites, aged
60 grams almond meal
100 grams powdered sugar
15 grams granulated sugar
To age egg whites, leave them uncovered at room temperature for 24-72 hours. I inverted a larger bowl over it to prevent any debris from falling in but left a gap for air exchange so that the whites would dry out properly. Weigh out the egg whites after you age them.
Preheat the oven to 290°F. Prepare heavy baking trays with parchment paper and set aside.
Combine the almond meal with the powdered sugar in a food process and blend together until extremely fine. Sift into a bowl and set aside.
In a clean stainless steel or copper bowl, beat the egg whites until very foamy and soft peaks form. Gradually beat in the granulated sugar and then continue beating until you get stiff glossy peaks. Add the almond and sugar mixture to the batter in quarters and fold it in quickly without overmixing. Flavorings and food coloring can be added with the almond and sugar additions. The end result should be stiff enough that a ribbon of batter drizzled from the spatula should take about 30 seconds to disappear into the batter.
Fill a pastry bag with the batter and pipe int to 1.5″ circles onto your baking sheet. Any peaks or tails should disappear by themselves after about 30 seconds. In fact, I used a star decorating tip on my cookies because I didn’t have any plain tips that were big enough.
Let your batter rest about 30 minutes or more, until they are no longer tacky when gently poked. Bake for 16-20 minutes, rotating the pan about halfway to ensure even baking. Cookies are done when they move without breaking when nudged.
Remove your cookies a few minutes after they come out of the oven and (ideally) let them cool with the feet side up on a baking rack. I missed that last step. Oops!
When cool, apply your filling. I used some leftover chocolate ganache from the cake I made a few days ago.
Mrs. Humble advises refrigerating your macarons for 2-3 days in a loosely covered container to let them mature for best texture and flavor. I’m not sure these will survive that long but if you try it, let me know how it works out for you.









