Custard Cream Filling

To expand off of the vanilla cream filling that I have made in all of my other previous macaron posts, this time I had decided to challenge making custard cream filling - one of my personal favorite flavors. As Hisako Ogita says, "Custard cream is made from a custard base of flour, eggs, milk, and sugar boiled down to make a thick cream" (48). Slightly intimidated by the fact that I was trying something new, I wasn't expecting much success going into baking this time, but I still gave it my best shot.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 vanilla bean
• 2 egg yolks
• 1/4 cup (50 grams) granulated sugar
• 1/3 cup (15 grams) pastry flour
• 7/8 cup milk

Steps:

First, I went through the same steps in my macaron crusts post to create the crusts, except with orange food coloring this time. I think these were the best looking crusts I had ever made, except for the fact that some of them had little bumps on the top (because my mother wanted to try using the pastry bag).

After the crusts were finished, I then moved on to the custard cream filling. Ogita says to put egg yolks and granulated sugar into a bowl and whisk until the mixture turned slightly white (48) - I was a bit scared at first because after whisking for a long time, the mixture stayed yellow and would not turn white at all. However, after about five minutes it looked kind of white. 

This led me to add the pastry flour to the mixture, and also start warming milk and vanilla bean pods in a pot over the stove. After the pot mixture was warmed, I poured it into the bowl mixture from before, only to pour it back into the pot, "straining it with a strainer" (Ogita 49). This helped removed all the excess from the mixture and make the mixture smoother.

As the strained mixture started to bubble, I was supposed to stir for one minute and then turn off the heat (Ogita 49). However, I left on the heat for a little too long, resulting in the custard turning out a bit lumpy after refrigerated...

But it all tasted good in the end. After my crusts baked, I spread the lumpy custard in between, creating orange(ish) custard macarons! In my opinion, these were the best macarons I had ever made because I didn't run into any troubles (except for the lumpy custard) and they were completed in under three hours - which is a great accomplishment they usually take FOREVER to make. Their appearance wasn't too bad either, except for the bumps my mom had made on the crusts...

THEY TASTED SO GOOD!

Q: What's your favorite flavor? (e.g. custard, caramel, vanilla, chocolate, strawberry...)

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

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.