macarons part deux

I am going to try to make macarons again. This time, I have prepared by grinding the too-big almond flour little smaller. Actually my wonderful mother did that for me. But anyway, I am going to use a recipe that has worked for me in the past so that I can show you something good. I got it from David Lebovitz's blog. He seems to have already gone through this process and gotten a good recipe. His turned out like this...

Beautiful, non?

So before I even started cooking, I already made the mistake of not aging my eggs. I am going to try warming a towel and wrapping my eggs like a blanket. I am using the microwave so it is important to wet the towel or else we might have a fire.

This recipe makes half as many cookies as the recipe from my last post, so it uses 2 eggs instead of 4. Another difference is that this mixes all of the dry ingredients together at the beginning instead of mixing the sugar with the eggs before the rest of the dry.

I'll show you "Good Eats" style:

Dry Team

Wet Team (eggs)

I found mixing this recipe a lot harder but the batter looks better than last time. It is thick and brownie-batter-ish. I put it in a pastry bag with a hole in the bottom standing in a cup. This is useful for stability if you bake alone and no one can hole the bag for you (I am too much of a control freak to bake with others). Also, when you lift the bag squeeze a little bit into the bottom of the cup to get used to the unnaturalness of piping. I find that piping from one place instead of in a spiral makes a more uniform and pretty macaron.

As you can see, these were really runny. I was actually really surprised! I separated them by running my spatula between them carefully. Unforunately, they ran back together in the oven. I am going to cut them apart while they are warm and soft. They did develop feet within minutes, however, which is awesome, but the tops cracked. I don't really mind because no one I am serving these to (besides my French teacher) knows that macarons should be flawless and smooth! This recipe said to cook them for 15-18 minutes, but I burn them every time, so I am cooking them for the minimum. Every minute is important!

Cool them completely before trying to remove them from the foil. Ok. After my peeling experience here, I am going to tell you NEVER USE FOIL. Use parchment paper! Some of my macarons looked good and I ended up poking holes in them and all sorts of nonsense. It was painful. Just avoid foil.

The picture below is just proof that they were, at one time, perfect-ish. But then I had to eat them off of the foil with a spoon.

I have to make another batch tomorrow because I signed up to bring these for a Madame Bovary watching party in French class. So there will be a new post tomorrow.

Lucky you.

xoxo,

allie