The Macaron/Macaroon Saga (Part One)

If you’re reading this in Australia, Masterchef is everywhere. “Did you watch Masterchef last night? So-and-so totally botched the pressure test.” What? What is this language?

To honour my non-watching of this season, I decided to finally give the delicate little thing a go. Firstly I’ll clarify a couple of things:

1) To settle all the debate and the questions, these biscuits themselves are actually macarons. Macaroon with a double o is a word used to apply to a variety of small cakes of meringue-like cookies. So technically it could probably apply as both, however if you are making the recipe with almond meal and egg whites like I am about to tell you below, they’re macarons. I’m not going to get all up in arms about it, I call it one or the other depending on how many letters I feel like pressing at the time.

This recipe is derived from the one that Callum used on Masterchef, and the original “Violet Macaroons with Raspberries and Buttercream” recipe is available on the Masterchef website.

Basic Plain Vanilla Macarons
(makes roughly 24 halves)

Ingredients

• 225g pure icing sugar (very important – if it has any other ingredients in it it’s not icing sugar it’s icing mixture, no matter what the front says)
• 130g almond meal
• 3 egg whites
• 60g caster sugar
• essence of your choice, to taste
• a few drops of food colour of your choice

Method

1. Preheat oven to 120C. It’s very important it stays at this temperature almost exactly, so be ready as always with your oven thermometers.
2. Sift almond meal and icing sugar into one bowl. Sift it again into another bowl, then back into the original bowl – so it should be sifted three times. Set aside.
3. With an electric mixer, beat the egg whites until doubled in size. Slowly add the caster sugar while mixing, and mix until it forms firm peaks. The way to tell is to lift the beaters out and if the peaks don’t drop back in, you are pretty much there. Another way is to slowly lift the bowl upside down (haha) and if the whites don’t move they’re also ready.
4. Add your essence to taste, then carefully add the food colouring. I chose only to add a little vanilla essence for this run, so my macarons are completely white.
5. Fold your sifted almond meal mixture into the egg white meringue, and keep folding gently until all combined and it starts to look smoother. The consistency should be not too runny, but not a dough either – it’s been described as a “magma”.
6. Place the mixture in a piping bag with a round tip and pipe 4 – 5cm diameter circles onto a lined baking tray. To do this, hold the bag 90 degrees half a cm off the baking paper, and squeeze. When the circle is big enough, stop piping and pull the tip out of the piped circle.
7. Leave them to rest for 15-20 minutes. If there are any little bits poking out of the top from when you piped them, you should be able to gently press them back down.
8. Place them into the oven and bake for 20 minutes. Remove them from the oven and let them to cool.

To make the filling, it is a small amount of buttercream – 85g unsalted butter and 100g sifted pure icing sugar. You can colour this too to match your macarons. Add more icing sugar as always if the buttery taste is still too much, but you also don’t want this to be a very thick and stiff buttercream. The consistency should match the light and airy taste of the macarons.

Now here’s some things that no one tells you about macarons:
- They are extremely fragile biscuits. Looking at them you would think they are completely rock solid and a full biscuit, when indeed they are meant to be slightly crispy on the outside and soft and moist on the inside. If you press too hard when handling them or picking them up from the tray, they’ll crack. I have had several disaster ones but also several perfect ones.
- You will need to use all the mixture on the first run. If you let the mixture sit too long in the bowl without piping it to form the skin, they won’t “pop” off of the tray and they will look like this:

- Now that I’ve tried this for the first time, I get the feeling there might not have been enough egg whites from the eggs that I used. I may try a fourth egg white in my next run, to see if that will improve the smoothness when piping. As you can see from the first picture, while it is great it’s not the perfect consistency, and I think it needs a little more liquid substance of some sort for that to happen. If you give that a go, let me know if it’s any better!

As always please feel free to use the contact form to send me any questions or comments, or leave a comment on a post!

Aside from macarons, I am scheduled to start a six month course in Patisserie on the 19th of July, so this blog should be a lot more active with lots of baking tips and tricks from the girl in Patisserie school!

x Monnie