genevieve.malarkey Bonjour, mes amis! Today I want to discuss one of the French–est desserts one can possibly come across. That petit cookie, in any color of the rainbow, that is synonymous with Paris, salons de thé, and is a visual symbol of la vie française. Oui, c’est le macaron.
I have a complicated hisotry with this tiny sweet treat. In all my travels throughout France, ironically, I was never introduced to the macaron. It wasn’t until I had been living back in the US and was attempting to bring all of the French nuances I could find into my life out of an intense homesickness for my time abroad that I discovered the delightfully airy, crunchy on the outside and melt-in-your-mouth inner softness of the sugary sweet cookie. Naturally, having the inconsolable sweet tooth that I do, it was love at first sight.
After many years of being the macaron’s biggest fan girl, I decided to take them on in the kitchen and make them myself. I was home with a toddler all day and had no hope of traveling any time soon, so I needed to take matters in my own hands. Being an ambitious baker, I figured they couldn’t be that far out of my skillset. Ha!
Having done much research online, I discovered that everyone basically has their own methods for making macarons, but the bottom line is this: they are not for the faint of heart. They are temperamental little buggers, who, if you so much as look at them wrongly during the baking process, will deflate in protest and your batch will be ruined. For instance, I learned that this cookie preferred the metric system to our US system, so I had to buy a food scale. I then needed to age my egg whites, so I separated the 3.5 (yes, three and one-half) egg whites, “aged” them in the fridge for 48 hours, then let them come to room temperature for two hours before whisking them into meringue. And it seemed that bakers fell into two different camps: those who used parchment paper to bake, and those who used reusbale silicone… I could not find a clear consensus on this aspect, so I went with the environmentally safer choice and used my Silpat sheets. There are many other technical nuances to this finnicky biscuit, which I will save for a more technical blog post, but suffice it to say, I dove in using the recipe from macaron-Mecca Ladurée (I mean, why not start with the best?), and the results were, how you say, not great.
I made so many batches of macarons over a year of experimenting in my kitchen. I processed the almond flour and powdered sugar together, changed the oven temperature, whisked the meringue to different consistencies (some blogs said stiff peaks, others said mostly stiff), tried it without food coloring (afriad the bright pink was scaring the egg whites into deflating), and I changed from silicone baking sheets to parchment paper and back again. I could not for the life of me get those dang shells to stop being hollow little domes. Oh sure, the macarons had the frilly feet (most of the time), and they usually had a smooth outer shell, but one bite into the thing and it all collapsed into a sugary hollowed-out imposter of the French delicacy. I read every conceivable blog on how to rid oneself of hollow macaron shells- there is actually a lot of info out there. I tried it all; nothing worked.
So, for TWO YEARS I gave up. It’s not that I felt defeated per se- I still ate them any time I came across them, researched them online, and made secret plans to sell them in my future coffee shop one day. I even inquired at a local café as to who their macaron supplier was (partly out of shock that my little Florida town even had access to such a treat). But life happened also; something about having a second baby, losing our home to a hurricane, rebuilding said home, etc. But I digress.
The point is, during this pandemic insanity, I decided it was time to try again. After all, I was forced into cancelling my trip to Paris, in which I had planned to eat as many macarons as humanly possible, so this was the next best thing to do. I decided quickly that I would try a new recipe since the Ladurée one was obviously too fickle for the likes of me. A quick internet search and I came across this recipe, which was not in the metric system, and written by a pastry chef who makes so many macarons she wrote a book about it. I didn’t second guess it and read fifteen other recipes; I just decided to go for it.
And guess what? THEY TURNED OUT GREAT.
Of course, I had had lots of practice. I knew how to test if the meringue was done (hold the bowl upside down over your head- if it doesn’t fall in your hair, it’s done), I knew how to macaronage (a real term) and get the cookie batter consistency to make an ubroken figure 8 in the bowl and to not over-fold the batter. I also knew to slam the tray down on the counter top several times to get the air bubbles out. But you know the biggest difference? It was that I did not stress about it. I took my time and did not rush in stressy concentration like I used to in times passed. I enjoyed the whisking of the meringue, didn’t overthink the meringue once I conducted “the bowl test,”, and I immediately stopped the macaronage method of folding the batter over and over when I achieved that ribbon-like quality. I piped those babies out into perfect little circles, blew a fan on them for a half hour (Florida is humid, so I did learn over that year of experimenting that they need a little help drying out in our horrid heat), and popped them in the oven. I rotated the pans halfway through, and when they were done I let them cool on the cookie sheets instead of impatiently trying to remove them while still hot and having them crumble or deflate.
Et…voilà. Uniform size, round, frilled feet, and NOT HOLLOW macarons. I’m almost as proud of them as I am of the fact that my 4 year old asks for a macaron with proper French pronunciation.
So the moral of my little story is to not be imtimidated. Yes, macarons are complicated and precise (they are French delicacies, after all). But part of the joy is in the process of creating them- something I had to learn after a two year hiatus. You don’t have to make macarons exactly like Ladurée to make delicious ones that bring you joy and make you feel like you are in France again. For really, that’s all that we want out of this little cookie, isn’t it? So give them a try, don’t be scared, and let me know how it goes!
À la prochaine-
geneviève
