It's Macaron Monday!

Are Macaron Monday’s a thing in the baking world?

I’m not sure, because the truth is, I’ve always been too intimidated to make them! The precision required to weigh, sift, fold, pipe, bake, and assemble the little French meringue cookies scared me off…and I’ve owned a home bakery for ten years!

Because of this extended social distancing time, I decided to give macarons a shot since I’m not filling orders and have time for a little R&D. Let’s be honest, baking research and development trumps all other industries. I get to look through Pinterest, browse other blogs, take mouth-watering pictures—and it usually ends with a taste test.

For my first bake with macarons, I wanted to try a standard, vanilla recipe that would give good feedback and had clear instructions. You can find the whole thing here at one of my favorite blogs, Preppy Kitchen. I read through his tips and committed them to memory, and then just started baking.

You’ll need a few special ingredients for macarons, namely almond flour. I’ve never worked with almond flour, but it needs sifted. A lot. And then you need to throw away all of the parts that are too big for the sifter so they don’t impede your delicate meringue.

Oh, and the vodka. Like I said, this is strictly for R&D (wink), so I used the vodka to wipe down my mixing bowl and attachment to sterilize them and rid them of any excess oil that may deflate my meringue. But, if you find any secondary uses for the leftover vodka, by all means, continue that R&D! And please let me know how that goes.

I’ve also never baked with a scale before—I know, shocking. But I decided to put my new scale to use, since macarons have an incredibly low margin for error. Measuring in grams (as opposed to cups, ounces, etc.) really isn’t that difficult and there wasn’t as big of a learning curve as I expected.

Next came the actual making of the batter, or macronage, which, from what I gather, is a fancy word for stirring. It requires patience, attention, and some arm muscles (no seriously, folding 40-50 times really works your upper body!). The most important part of the mixing, once you get stiff peaks in your meringue, is folding. Fold, fold, and fold those dry ingredients some more until you get “figure 8 ribbons” in your batter.

Figure what? That’s about the most vague description I’ve ever heard. But this video from Sugar Geek helped me see that, yes, you actually do fold until your batter can make a continuous figure 8. So that’s what I did!

Then I filled my piping bag and piped 1-inch circles all over my parchment paper that I stuck down with some batter. I wasn’t sure how much the meringue would spread in the oven, so I spaced them out a good bit. After you pipe them, you let them rest until they set up and are firm to the touch.

The 40-minute resting time went pretty quick, because we had a family Zoom call to distract me!

Sorry, you probably don’t care about that. But I do! So that’s why I put in on here. Because it’s my blog and I do what I want (kidding, sort of).

Back to the Macs:

Here they’ve rested and are ready for the oven. The resting period lets them rise up in the oven instead of spreading out, or so I’ve been told.

And that’s exactly what they did! *silently fist pumps alone in my kitchen.

I put nonpareil rainbow sprinkles on half of them, just to further my R&D work. And because I love them.

Okay, the hard part is done! All that I did after celebrating their seamless baking process was whip up a batch of my favorite vanilla buttercream, threw it in a piping bag, and piped a circle onto the bottom of half of the cookies, then topped them off with the other half of the batch.

Well, then I rolled some in sprinkles, because like I said earlier, I can. And I love sprinkles.

To answer your question, yes, I did get a little heavy-handed with the buttercream. But again, buttercream is my favorite part of any dessert, and I made these macarons for myself. Therefore, I put lots of buttercream in them.

Now we’re done!

Except, don’t eat them. At least not for another day or two after they sit in the fridge. Supposedly the flavors develop to give you a cohesive Mac, but clearly I couldn’t wait, so I took a bite. But I needed a good picture (see above), so someone had to do it.

Best of luck with your own Mac bakes, and be sure to let me know how it goes! I promise, it’s not as scary as it looks.

If I can do it, you can too!

xoxo,

jorie