Macaron Making!

During my time off, I decided to set myself a few goals.

Goal 1: Do not spend every day sleeping until noon, only waking to eat oven fries and fishfingers and catch reruns of Bones.

Goal 2: Master the art of macaron making. Find previously unknown but prodigious talent for baking French sweets. Open Patisserie. Become beloved celebrity chef -> succeed in life.

Goal 3: Clean my room

To make the macarons I followed the awesomely detailed tutorial at Melanger. This recipe uses Italian Meringue technique.

I’m not a huge baker. But I am prone to overly ambitious whims. I wish I had a photo of the glorious apple and cinnamon soufflé I decided to make when I was 14. But I do not, so please enjoy this faithful depiction:

Guess who misplaced her wacom!

Buoyed by that success – I was determined, DETERMINED to make this work. I tried to follow the recipe as close as I could… EXCEPT I did not leave my eggs to age uncovered. Oh noes. I don’t know if it was because of this, but my mixture was extremely runny.

So I’m hesitant to give any advice because whatever I did probably wasn’t the right way at all haha.

Eggs whites mixed with sugar syrup

Mixing in colour

Meringue Mixture

Icing sugar mixed with Almond Meal

Mixing the rest of the egg whites with the Almond Meal mixture

Folding in the pink Italian Meringue. Mmm gloopy

MARVEL at my AMAZING piping skills. No two shapes are the same! It’s a talent I tell you!

I think I need to buy a larger piping nozzle. Mine was way too small. Also you can see why I was slightly freaked out at this point. My mixture just didn’t look as meringuey as everyone else’s. I was scared that I’d end up with incredibly flat macarons, as my little blobs just spread and glooped outwards as soon as I piped them onto the paper.

Oh Well! Too late to turn back now! Time for baking.

Oven time!

I was really relieved and excited to see them rising in the oven. I pulled up a chair and parked myself in front of the oven door… waiting for those tantalising 15 minutes to go by.

After I took this photo, I may have run around the kitchen screaming “THEY HAVE FEET! THEY HAVE FEET!!”

Sleep time my little macarons

And feet they did have! They were a little bit too big, and I think I folded a bit too much air into my mixture, as they were a bit hollow. But they were crisp on the outside, and chewy on the inside and that made me pretty happy!

Next time: try to make my mixture less gloopy. And some were too big, so they collapsed on themselves! That’s ok. More ugly ones for me to eat.

Next post: The Result!

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