You Had Me At Macaroons

As promised from my previous post, I am going to regale you of my adventures in macaroon-ing. In all reality, making french macaroons are not all that difficult. The gorgeous little beauts (insert Australian crocodile hunter voice) only take a little time and tlc.

Your basic french macaroon only consists of 5 main ingredients:

1 cup powdered sugar

3/4 cup almond flour (see recipe here)

2 egg whites

1/4 cup sugar

1/8 tsp cream of tartar

Mix together almond flour and powdered sugar.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Whisk egg whites until light and frothy.

Add in cream of tartar and blend until soft peaks form.

Mix in sugar and mix until stiff peaks form.

Fold in flour mixture.

In a zip top bag with a small tip cut off, pipe small round dots (about an inch) on a parchment lined baking sheet.

Drop the oven temperature down to 325 degrees and allow the cookies to sit at room temperature for 15 minutes before putting them in the oven.

You can take this time to tap down the tops and smooth them over.

Bake them for 10 minutes.

Repeat the same process of raising the oven temperature to 375 degrees then dropping down to 325 degrees and allowing the cookies to sit for 15 minutes before putting into the oven.

That the basic recipe.  Now from here, the possibilities are endless.  You can substitute pistachio flour, cocoa powder, etc to make different flavors. The filling for these little sandwich cookies are equally as endless.  Since I always seem to have a little vanilla buttercream on hand, I usually fill them with that but you can fill them with jams, gnashes or whatever tickles your fancy that day.

Once you've filled your cookies with whatever weapon of choice, top it with another macaroon and revel in your creation!

 

So now that you know that macaroons aren't ask scary as you once thought, get out there and show off your french baking skills.