Macaron Marathon

Day three of the baking marathon continues. Since I had 5~ egg whites left from making tim's birthday cake, I thought I'd give macarons another whirl. I had made macaron's before, using David Lebovitz French Chocolate Macaron Recipe. This time I ran three batches, one with the french chocolate and two from Serious Eats. The Raspberry butter cream filling was my own twist.


Needless to say, Macarons are featured quite often in lolita fashion. Prints, jewelry, accessories... there is something charming in these meringue esque almond flour based sandwich cookie treats.

There is also something evil.

Evil, you say? How could something so cute and tasty be evil? Well, maybe evil is an exaggeration. Frustration might be the more accurate word. Macarons are notoriously finicky things to make, factors like humidity, what time of oven you have, the eggs, not owning a scale, the alignment of the stars, your blood type, and not owning a sifter affecting your work in a very do or die way. The chocolate batch I ran with Lebovitz recipe came out 'good', I would say. The feet formed, none of them cracked on top, they were just smaller and chubbier than I would have liked.


This is the 2nd batch I ran with the serious eats. As you can see there is something seriously wrong with them. Too runny, didn't rise and cracked. I think I didn't whip the egg whites enough, for fear of over beating them (that's like, my number one macaron fear. It haunts me in my sleep). I also added red food coloring because I wanted pink macarons. I'm going to have to revise this plan because once I baked my pink cookies, they turned... fleshy salmony which reminded me of my strawberry key lime pie.


Third time's the charm you say? Yes, it certainly was. I used the same recipe, but now that I was in the **zone** I had a better idea of what I was doing so I could work around my odd volume of egg whites and powdered sugar mix. I also mixed the dye so it was lavender coloured, but when they baked it turned... brown egg-tan. I really have no idea. Anyways, what I should have done to make them perfect was rap the sheets so the air bubbles burst (it caused quite a few to crack) and let it rest to harden the shell but I was in a rush because the kitchen needed to be used by others. The perfect ones of this batch though, were perfect.


Raspberry Buttercream Filling


2 sticks of unsalted butter, room temp.
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups of confectioner's sugar
1/4 cup pureed raspberry, fresh or frozen

Whip the butter in a mixer for about 3 min. until fluffy and light. Then add the egg yolk and the vanilla, mix until blended. Gradually add the confectioner's sugar in 1/4 measurements, scraping the sides of the bowl before each addition. Add the raspberry puree, blend a little more until combined, and there you have it! Spoon into a pastry bag with a medium size tip and make macarons to your hearts content.

So many!! I am exhausted from making so many macarons in one day. It's very stressful, but ultimately rewarding (if you are a baking-freak like me, also possibly a masochist)












Rejects-ville. Don't worry guys, even if you aren't the prettiest macarons people will still eat you. What kind of world do we live in??