Making Macaron Crusts

Macarons are personally my favorite dessert. The cute appearance and unique texture of the puffs combined with the rich filling compliment each other in an addicting manner that will make you want more! However, eating these sweet confections is way easier than making them. To get the right signature texture of the crust, you have to be exactly precise when measuring and mixing ingredients. Therefore, I tried to challenge myself by attempting to make a basic macaron crust.

Vanilla Flavored Macaron Batter

Ingredients:

• 2/3 cup (85 grams) ground almonds
• 1 1/2 cups (150 grams) powdered sugar
• 3 large egg whites, at room temperature "Eggs at room temperature beat up better than an egg that you crack open right from the refrigerator" (Ogita, 20).
• 5 tablespoons (65 grams) powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, or seeds from 1/2 vanilla bean

(Tip: weighing ingredients with a kitchen scale is more accurate than measuring with cups and spoons)

Steps
The first step was to grind the almonds and powdered sugar in a food processor into a fine powder. Once this was done, I tried to sift the mixture through a fine-mesh sieve, but this was hard to do so because the book had specifically called for a medium-mesh sieve (Ogita, 24). The holes were too small for the mixture to fall through easily, so this step took more than an hour to complete. If I had a bigger mesh-sieve, the sifting wouldn't have been so hard to complete.

Once I had sifted the mixture thoroughly two times, I set the powder aside and started beating egg whites on high speed while gradually adding granulated sugar and vanilla. Once the meringue was stiff and firm with a glossy texture (Ogita, 25), this indicated the next stept to add the sifted flour powder to the meringue.

Macaronnage is the exact term for mixing the flour mixture and the meringue together to make macarons. You basically spread the batter against the sides of the bowl and then scoop it from the bottom and mix it together. It was confusing at first, but you get the hang of it pretty quickly after a few tries.

"If the macaronnage step is repeated less than 10 times, the baked macarons will lack luster. However, when it is repeated more than 20 times, oil stains may remain on the pastry's surface when the macarons are baked" (Ogita, 26). - which shows how precise you have to be when stirring the mixture. I mixed mine about 15 times before moving the batter into a pastry bag.

When squeezing the batter onto the baking sheet, I would advise making VERY small circles and leave a lot of space in between, or else your poor macarons will end up like this after you bake it:

Deformed, uneven, and ugly... My family ate all the deformed ones that had no partner - and they actually tasted pretty decent. The other good thing about my macaron crusts besides the fact that they came out in weird shapes is that they formed a pied, or a "foot" at their bottoms. This is the small pleat like frills at the bottom of a macaron. Without the pied, the cookie cannot be called a macaron (Ogita, 29). So in a way, I sort of succeeded making macaron crusts for the first time in my life. The next step is to create the filling!

Q: Have you ever tried to make macarons? If so, what was the hardest part of baking them? If not, would you try and attempt to bake them?

Ogita, Hisako. I Macarons. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2009. Print.