Macarons

Grace and Sophia have become obsessed with macarons.  I first had some in Quebec City and then I started bringing them home from Coquette Patisserie, the great new patisserie in University Circle. The girls can think of little else.  They are expensive little suckers – usually $2 a piece, so we thought we can make them ourselves surement. I am very proud that we conquered them with surprisingly little trouble.  We have made two batches over the past two weekends and they both turned out great.  Sophie had done a lot of research looking at recipes, reading tips and watching videos which helped a lot.

Macarons

makes about 12 -18 completed macarons depending on how big you make them

• 3 egg whites
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 2 cups confectioners sugar
• 1 cup almond flour
• pinch of salt
• 1/2 t. cream of tartar

Sift together the almond flour and confectioners sugar into a bowl.  In a separate bowl mix the egg whites, salt and cream of tartar to mix.  Add the 1/4 cup of white sugar.  Then mix on high until hard peaks are formed.  About 5 minutes or so.  Add whatever food coloring you’re using now and mix well.  Also any other flavors that you want with your cookies.  With a spatula, mix the dry mixture into the meringue a little bit at a time. Take your time. Once all is mixed together continue to mix until the batter is smooth and the ribbon stage.  this took us about 5-8 minutes.  You want it to be incorporated and smooth.  Put your batter in a piping bag and pipe onto a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper into 1 inch rounds.  They will spread a bit as they sit.  Let the cookie sheets sit for 1/2 hour to get slightly hard on the top.  Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.  Our oven took about 15-18 minutes.  Don’t brown them at all.  Let cool and ours popped right off the parchment paper.  Make your favorite filling, pipe some onto flat side of one cookie and then very gently press another cookie onto the filling.  Keep refrigerated and let sit at room temperature for a bit before eating – doesn’t usually happen.

Our raspberry macarons had no flavoring in the cookies – just red food coloring – which is typical of most recipes.  We then made a buttercream filling with fresh raspberry puree.  The lemons ones we added a 1/2 t of lemon juice and 1 t of zest in the cookies and made another buttercream with lemon juice and zest.