Ah macarons. Where do I begin now?
Google "Macaron Recipes" and in no time you'll be begging for someone to throw you a lifeline and drag you out of the recipe tsunami. Not only are there possibly hundreds of recipes, there are also possibly tens of variations of each step involved and even variations in the pre-processing of the ingredients!
I foolishly decided that the best way forward would be to pick one recipe at random and just roll with it. I ended up with little maca-frisbees instead of dainty, well risen macarons and had to consign the whole batch to the bin. Hard lesson indeed.
Nevertheless, I decided that I had to make these or at the very least, turn out something that remotely resembled macarons. So began the long research and cross referencing between popular recipes, ditching some and picking others.
Shells aside, the filling had to be sorted out as well and a reliable buttercream recipe had to be found. It looked like my work was really cut out for me.
Thankfully I managed to stumble upon a buttercream that wasn't too cloyingly sweet and bitty with sugar crystals. Now for the shells. After reading through seemingly endless pages upon pages of tips and tricks, the gist seemed not to over mix the beaten egg whites and to sift in the ground almonds.
Armed with that, I set about making the macarons, determined to get at least one decent looking one that I could reward myself with for all the time spent on the research. The importance of using a hand mixer instead of a stand mixer cannot be over-emphasized enough! Using the much less powerful hand mixer gave me so much more control over the whisking process and I was able to stop before ending up with hard, foamy and chunky whites.
The batter still looked good after mixing the almond meal and sugar in with the colouring - not too runny and definitely pipe-able. Wasn't long before I had baking trays with little beads of glistening macaron batter neatly arranged in rows...very near the end now..don't screw up!
After resting the dainty little babies for about half-an-hour, in they went into the oven in a double tray to get that elusive "feet" everyone swoons about. After about 10 minutes of frantic finger crossing and pacing back and forth, they were done!
Oh what joy it is to find the feet on these lovely, fragile and temperamental beauties! Not the most perfect bunch of macs by a mile but compared to my maca-frisbees, these are a definite upgrade!
