Laduree Coconut Macaroons: Recipe (trial and error)

I love my laduree cookbook. It had a beautiful plush velvet cover and gold gilded pages. It was quite an expensive book (around $35) but if full of so many recipes and beautiful pictures. Unfortunately, including this recipe I have made two.  Why? Because the ingredients or the equipment needed is hard to find and expensive! The most popular recipe is of course the almond macarons (of which I cannot spend $12 on a bag of almond flour) and many of the recipes are ice cream (and I don’t have an ice cream maker).  I found one recipe though that didn’t seem complicated: Coconut macaroons.

Ingredients:

100 ml whole milk

225 grams granulated sugar

275 grams ground coconut (coconut flour)

2.5 Tbsp. cake flour

4 eggs

That doesn’t seem to bad right? Except “Ground coconut” isn’t the stuff you normally buy for macaroons. I tried that and everything ended in a runny mess and a waste. Instead ground coconut is a dried and ground coconut. This is quite fine and coconut flour is an even finer yet ground. I couldn’t find coconut flour but, after much searching, I found dried ground coconut in the Indian food section at Wegman’s grocery store.

fail macaroons

the brand of ground dried coconut I used

What you have to do is heat the milk until hot (not scalded or boiling) and then add it to the sugar and coconut. I first added it to the sugar to melt it a bit and then added it to the coconut. This then has to sit for an hour. After this you add the flour and whole eggs. This then has to sit covered in the fridge for 12 hours. Yes 12 hours. The dried coconut had to soak up all the liquid. It shouldn’t be really wet or runny at this point, just a bit damp and paste like.

After 12 hours you must preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and cover a baking sheet with parchment paper.  The recipe said it’s possible to pipe out, but I found it impossible. Maybe if you had the finer ground flour it could, but I just use a spoon. I spooned about an inch to 1.5 inch balls onto the tray. It was a bit crumbly at this point, but paste like enough to be shaped. I then cooked them for 15 minutes or until the bottoms were a light brown and the tops got a bit toasty but were still mostly white.

This recipe said it should make around 50 macaroon, but with my size (which is average for macaroons) I made 25. The macaroon turned out pretty good this time. They weren’t fantastic (I’ve had better from bakeries and some grocery stores) but they also aren’t overly sweet or bad.

Overall, this recipe turned out ok the second time, just do not used grated/chipped/shredded coconut. Only use ground and dried coconut or coconut flour. I do not know if I’ll make this again because the ground coconut was a little pricey (around 3.50 for a bag of 400 grams) and I didn’t feel these are some sort of heavenly magical Laduree macaroon.