Last week, I said I was going to try something totally different to normal and that’s exactly what I tried this week, Macarons. These are so difficult to get right first time but I can say this week’s blog was certainly a learning curve. This was definitely a good starting point and considering how wrong they could’ve gone I’m classing this as half a success.
I started by sieving 100g icing sugar and 100g ground almonds together. I’ve seen recipes in the past where people pulse these together a few times to make the top of the Macarons smoother. In a separate bowl, I whisked 2 egg whites until soft peaks formed. I also slowly added 55g caster sugar slowly to the egg whites until the mixture became thicker and looked glossy. I then added some blue food colouring, I think next time I’m going to do a range of colours. I added the egg whites to the almonds and icing sugar. I then mixed the two together until the two were combined. Once the mixture was ready to be piped if you lifted a spoon from the mixture it left visible ruffles on the top. Another way is to see if you can draw a figure 8 without it breaking in the bowl.
Once the mixture is ready fill a piping bag, I used a round piping nozzle. When piping the macarons you can use a template on the baking paper, because I didn’t know how they were going to turn out I just winged it. To be fair I wasn’t bothered if they weren’t perfect which mine certainly weren’t. When piping them make sure you leave a gap between each one. Once you’ve piped them, you need to hit the tray on the work surface to bring air bubbles to the surface. You should be able to see the bubbles pop, if any get stuck at the surface you can pop them with a toothpick and then smooth out the surface. If you want to add sprinkles to the top its best to do it now, I added some rainbow ones. Before you bake them, you need to leave them until the surface isn’t tacky when you touch them. I left mine for 30 minutes before I put them in the oven. I baked them for 12 minutes at 160 degrees.
After they baked I left them to cool on the tray. Considering this was the main part I was worried about they didn’t bake to badly and rose a little, next time I think I’d prefer it if they were more uniform. For the filling I just used some vanilla buttercream, that seemed like a safe bet. Have a read at my previous blogs on who to make this buttercream. I filled the piping bag with a star nozzle and piped the buttercream onto one macaron and sandwiched it with another one. For mine I put sprinkles on half of them and left the other half plain as they were the bottom ones. The buttercream filled the macarons nicely. If you want you could fill the middle of the macarons with ganache or a more bitter filling to contrast the sweetness of the macaron. You could also roll the macaron in sprinkles so they would stick to the buttercream.
You can literally experiment with so many different colours and flavourings. For a first attempt I was actually pretty happy with how these turned out and I’m going to try them again next week to see if I can make them better. Next time I’m going to heat my sugar and make a syrup before I add it to the egg whites to see the difference. I’m just happy I challenged myself to try something that is hard to get right the first time and was something I’ve never made before. I know I’m certainly going to keep making them until I make them better, so I hope my family like Macarons. Have a lovely week!
Lots of love,
Hannah
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