Macarons: First Try

If anyone is interested at all in French desserts, then you know about the infamous macaron. For those who don’t it is a type of French sandwich cookie made of an almond meal meringue top and bottom with a filling (often a ganache) inside. Popular brands or “houses” of these macarons are Laduree and Pierre Hermes. These are notoriously hard to bake and there are hundreds of recipes and tips and trick out on the internet to make this process easier.

I have been interested in making these for a long time, but one of the key ingredients, almond flour, is both hard to find and very expensive where I live. While I was in the UK I picked up some almond flour but unfortunately not enough for a full recipe! Luckily, I found a small recipe online and decided to try it out.

The recipe is from: http://chilitonka.com/2014/03/09/makaroniki-pomaranczowe-orange-curd-macarons/

I also made the orange curd to go with it, but it didn’t turn out that yummy because I think I used an overripe orange and didn’t cook it long enough.

I followed the directions given making sure to tap the trays vigorously after piping and to let them sit until they had a top layer. I also used Nutella as a filling instead of curd every other time.

unbaked

My main problem when making these was that there was so little batter and my bowl so big that there was no way for me to actually mix the batter; I could only smooth it against the bottom of the bowl.  This made it harder to judge when it was mixed so I ended up with lumpy topped macarons. I also do not have a piping bag so I used a ziplock (and got ridges because of it.) They had feet though!

Overall I think this was a good first try! They didn’t take as long as I thought they would and I recently was able to find a relatively cheap brand of almond flour and my wegmans grocery store so I will be trying a full recipe soon!