I have wanted to try them forever and ever and finally bought them when we were at the Good Food Show in November: 5 quid for 4 macarons- that is as highway robbery as is paying more than 5 Euros for a bottle of plonk on the continent. Lavender and creme (purple), citrus and ginger (yellow and cream), green tea, and I don't remember the last one but I do remember it was pretty and yummy. Of course the next step is to attempt them myself.
Well, the ones I made were certainly not as dainty as the ones I see on the high street- I call them rustic; but they certainly packed the flavour that I anticipated. I certainly learned a few things whilst making them, as well.
Lesson 1: my large food processor is not designed for such elegant work. The recipe calls to "sift icing sugar and almond flour into the bowl. If you have ground almonds, pulverise in the food processor until they are very fine". I dumped the almonds/icing sugar into the food processor, and in baking moment designed entirely for Lucille Ball, made a cloud of icing sugar/ground almonds in my face and in the kitchen. I realised this wasn't working, so waited for the cloud to settle and made a decision to skip to the next step.
Since I had ground almonds that looked like they were small enough to sift, I dumped all the almonds and equal part of icing sugar into my incy tincy hand sifter from Ikea (first time I used it... see, I bought it knowing that I would use it... even if it was a year later), tried to pull the lever, and nothing happened.
Lesson 1a: do not put more than 1/2 a cup of anything into your puny Ikea hand sifter. 40 minutes later, most of the material was sifted, apart from the larger almond nuggets. By this point, I now understood why macarons are 1.25GBP each and chucked the nuggets into the sifter mix.
Lesson 1b: next time, buy almond flour instead; however, when I tried to implement this lesson in the second round, I found that I actually can't find almond flour in any normal shops. Can some one please spare me a top tip here and tell me where I can find it?
I carried on to make the meringue and fold in my sifted ingredients. In attempts 1 and 2 (with pink food colouring) my meringue worked perfectly. Now I know I studied food science, but can someone please explain to me why meringue collapses when you add yellow food colouring? I haven't googled it yet, but would love to hear some speculation.
Lesson 2: when you want to make a yellow/orange meringue, follow the recipe that calls for cocoa powder and not yellow food colouring.
Once mixed, it was piping time:
Lesson 3: filling your piping bag with sticky goo takes a certain amount of patience and skill. I was instructed to pipe the meringue onto the baking sheet to the size of a walnut. Well, is that a walnut in the shell or out? How big is a walnut? I am allergic to walnuts, and I can't really remember what they look like. Whatever, I went on what I thought was the size of a walnut in its shell from what I remember my mom to have in the Christmas nut bowl.
Lesson 4: they actually meant the size of a cracked walnut, because if you see my picture, my macaron tops are far too fluffy to be considered elegant. They are more like the big fat gypsy wedding of the macaron world: all the pink, fluff, and sparkle- but mine are a step up in that they actually have taste! Now, I know I was just cursing the yellow food die for killing my meringue, but the flatter meringue did produce a smoother, flatter macaron. Top tip #2: don't gypsy your meringue, a soft tulle is better looking.
While they sit to set (apparently they develop a "characteristic skin") I made a ganache. While that set, I... doesn't matter. A few hours later...
Lesson 5: you need at least half a day to build macarons.
Merry Christmas!
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