Sunday Baking Series: Our First Homemade Macarons
Actually, “first” is a lie. I’ve made homemade macarons 4 times in my life, with progressive success (“success” being a relative term), but this time I had a teammate. That teammate happens to be a materials engineer who fixates on following instructions perfectly, so I felt better about my chances.
That teammate also happens to live in my house, so even if the macarons didn’t turn out quite right, someone would eat them. And I’d have someone to blame it on. But in all seriousness, if you are trying to do something intimidating in the kitchen, be it as simple as chopping vegetables or as complex and making croissants, embarking on the project with someone else makes the investment worth it. Worst case scenario, the food ends up in the trash and you have a good memory of spending time with someone, but sharing perfection with someone else is also quite a treat.
We used Stella Parks’ well-researched method to tackle this finicky (or “fiddly,” as we learned from The Great British Bakeoff) process. She recommends reading all her macaron articles before beginning, so we did. I love her advice that “macarons are for eating”- it really takes the pressure off when you keep in mind that even if the final product doesn’t turn out “perfectly,” it’s still quite delicious!
A mistake I’ve made in my past macaronage was jumping right in to flavored macarons. As a scientist, I should know better. As a scientist, Hubtastic did know better. As Stella recommends, this time we went as simple as possible- plain shells with a touch of vanilla bean- to eliminate variables. To inject some flavor, we decided to have fun with a chocolate ganache filling.
I started on the laborious almond flour and confectioner’s sugar sifting process while Hubtastic took on the template creation. Lacking a round cookie cutter, we had to get a little innovative with our stencil:
Together, we watched the mixer for about 10 minutes while egg whites whipped up with the vanilla bean, sugar, and salt. It took two of us to feel confident that we had reached the proper dry/stiff texture. This is when you (and me, previously) could add flavors/colors, but we’re here to learn and perfect now, so on to the blending stage.
Blending the dry mix into the meringue is, to me, the scariest part. I’ve always erred on the side of undermixed, which results in an unfortunate crunchy texture. The shells are closer to traditional airy meringues than soft pillows, which means all the filling squeezes out when you bite into it. Still delicious, but unfortunate.
This time, I had a teammate reading and re-reading “Essentially, the macaron batter needs enough thickness that it will mound up on itself, but enough fluidity that after 20 seconds, it will melt back down” out loud as I stirred as a reminder that it’s ok to deflate the meringue.
Hubtastic also got his first lesson in folding technique at this point. It may seem daring to let a first-timer mix macaron batter, but you have to go slow and evaluate at each turn anyway, so why not use this as practice?
Having survived mixing, we moved on to piping and discovered he’s an expert macaron piper. Though, as it turns out, I’m better at whacking the trays on the counter to knock out any remaining air bubbles. Everyone has their skills.
In to the oven… fingers crossed!! I whipped up the ganache while we waited. I actually made a mistake here- I used un-homogenized-super-fancy-local-heavy-cream- which resulted in a ganache swimming in a pool of melted butter. Fortunately, I was able to drain off the grease and the ganache turned out totally delicious, if a little too thick.
Moment of truth…
We got teeny tiny baby feet! First time I’d ever accomplished that. Sure, there were some hollow shells, and some cracked shells, and some shells without feet, and the ganache was too thick to pipe out, but based on the first bite of a broken shell right out of the oven, we’d definitely achieved some level of delicious success.
As you can likely tell from the photo above, we still have a long way to go to make a full batch of consistently perfect macarons. Potential variables to work on are:
- Fresher almond flour- Ours had been in the freezer, which may have dried it out, resulting in hollow cracked shells.
- More smearing, less stirring- We may have left too much air in the mixture, affecting how the shells rose in the oven.
- Lower oven temp? The outer shells were cracked, as were the ones on the bottom shelf, which may be a result of sitting closer to the hot walls of the oven.
Regardless of appearance, all of our macarons had a thin, brittle outer layer with plenty of pillowy soft meringue on the interior, perfectly balanced against the density of the ganache. We were both hesitant about the plain vanilla flavor, but those little seeds really did add dimension, and of course the chocolate ganache was a perfect punch of bittersweetness.
As Stella so aptly says, “We can’t all go to Paris or live in a big city with adorable macaron cafes on every street corner [ironically, we have a macaron shop down the street]. Make macarons because you want to eat one, not because you want to look at one.” Granted, I could look at that photo all day. But she’s totally right- we didn’t discriminate when we devoured the cracked homemade macarons versus the sturdy ones in just two days.
Did we attain perfection? No. But was the experience worth it? Yes. Will we try again? Absolutely!
One of the great things about cooking is that you always have another chance. It’s very likely that at some point you’ll screw up a recipe you thought you mastered, and that’s ok. If you do something perfectly the first time, you didn’t get a chance to learn how to do it better next time. Food is for fueling, celebrating, sharing, enjoying, and there are reasons to eat, and therefore cook, every day.
So don’t be afraid to try something challenging. It may not look like a professional made it, but I’m willing to bet it will taste even sweeter.