I find it very difficult to walk past a macaron stall
without buying one, or three! The crisp outer shell and that gorgeous crunch into
a smooth, slightly chewy, light, soft filling... oh those little gems! I’ve recently
discovered salted caramel flavour - Oh la la! (They are next to be made!) I’ve
always thought that something so wonderfully scrumptious could only be cooked
by some fine Parisian-trained patissier. But guess what folks? Not so. These macaron are
simple to bake. The hardest part for me was trying not to eat all the mixture before baking, and the constant whisking of the
meringue(No fancy-pance Mixmaster for me sadly, just the old hand whisk!).
With this simple recipe I have made a delicate pink macaron with a raspberry
jam filling. Makes 16 delightfully amazing macarons
Prep time: approx.
20 min. Resting time: approx. 15min. cooking time: about 15 min per batch
Kitchen stuff
needed: 2 x baking trays (1 will do if that’s all you have), baking paper, large
frypan, teaspoon, whisk, (or mixmaster/electric whisker if you have one)
Ingredients from
the garden:
15 fresh ripe
Raspberries (or a small punnet if not growing them)
Other Ingredients:
1 cup icing sugar
3/4 Cup almond meal
2 Large egg whites,
room temperature
1 sm pinch of
bicarbonate soda
1/4 Cup caster
sugar
1/2 Vanilla bean,
scraped or 1/4 Tsp. Vanilla extract
a few drops of red food colouring
½ cup raspberry jam
Let’s do it:
1. Preheat
oven to 190 degrees. Prepare parchment lined baking sheets.
2. Combine
the almond flour and icing sugar. Mix so that there are no lumps.
3. Whisk
egg whites with mixer on medium speed until foamy (or hand whisk if you are up
for it). Add bicarb and continue to whisk until soft peaks form.
4. Add
caster sugar and whisk until stiff peaks form. This may take a while! Stiff
peaks = when you lift up the whisk and turn it upside down, the little peak
that forms should stay in place and not tip over at the point).
5. At
this point, if you want a different colour macaron then add little by little
the food colouring to the egg white and also add the vanilla bean scrapings or
clear vanilla extract. Whisk just until the colour is pretty much uniform. It
does not need to be completely combined, little areas of white is fine.
6. Sift
the almond meal and sugar mixer into the egg whites. Fold just until everything
is combined. Do not over fold - the whole point of beating up your egg whites
to a stiff peak is to incorporate air, so you don’t want to deflate it by over
folding.
7. The
mixture should be thick and sticky. Transfer the batter to a pastry piping bag
with a 1/2 inch plain round tip. Listen closely here! Pipe the batter onto the
parchment lined pan by holding the tip straight up and down and making sure it remains
straight as you pipe the batter. Keep the tip in one position (no need to move
it around, the batter will spread to a circle on its own). Pipe them at least
2cm apart and as uniform in size as possible. If you’re really nervous, you can
also draw circles on the baking paper, flip it upside down so you can still see
the circles and pipe until the batter fills the circle.
8. Turn
the oven down to 160 degrees.
9. Tap
the pan on the countertop a few times and hit the bottom of the pan with your
hands. Let the pans sit for 15 minutes. Tap it a lot - you will see some
bubbles come to the top and pop and that’s exactly the purpose of the tapping!
This is such an important step - I have gotten macarons that fall apart, have
holes in the bottom, don’t puff up and pretty much everything else that could
go wrong because I did not tap the pan enough or let them sit long enough. DO
NOT TAP THE PAN AFTER THEY HAVE RESTED. Carefully place them in the oven - any
hard hit to them will result in cracks when baked.
10.
Bake one pan at a time and rotate
the pan 5 minutes in. Bake another 5 minutes and take them out. (Total bake
time - 15 minutes) Let them rest on the pan for 10 minutes. Transfer to wire
rack. It should not be hard to take them off but if they are somehow sticking
to the pan spray some water under the baking paper and the steam should release
the cookies.
11.
Filling: take a saucepan and put
on high, when warm add raspberry jam and fresh raspberries. Gently crush some
of the fresh ones up, but keep a little chunky if possible. But aside to cool.
12.
Match up macarons of similar size
and gently add a small teaspoon of filling to each, and add its little mate to
make your perfect sweet macaron.
Enjoy slowly with a glass of French champagne
Soundtrack for Macaron : La Femme Chocolat by
Olivia Ruiz
