More Croissants, Please!

As promised, I have a recipe for French Macarons today.  A while ago, my mom and I took a macaron class at Sur La Table.  The class was really good and we were able to successfully repeat the recipe at home; it made it really interesting to learn from our amazing pastry chef and clear up some of the things that I didn’t know at the Sur La Table (SLT) class.

Ingredients (makes 18-20 normal size cookies, or 9-10 sandwiches):

• 100g almond powder
• 100g powdered sugar
• 33g egg whites (step 1)
• Pinch of color
• 100g sugar
• 25g water
• 33g egg whites (step 2)
• Egg white powder

You can prepare the egg whites up to a week in advance and store them in the fridge – this makes them less elastic and easier to whip.  We whipped everything by hand, but at home I would use a mixer so it wouldn’t really matter how old the egg whites are!  Before starting the recipe, bring egg whites to room temp.

1. Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius.
2. Mix almond powder and icing sugar in the bowl of a blender – blend for 15 seconds.  Don’t blend for too long or you will make really sweet almond butter.
3. Sift your mixture and set aside.  You can do these two steps 4-5 days before.
4. Make an Italian Meringue.  When I took the class at SLT, they had us make a French meringue.  The French meringue is much easier, and the teacher’s explanation was that there is basically no difference in the final cookie, so make the easy version.  However – I learned that the cookies made with Italian Meringue keep much better in the freezer.  So depending on your use of the cookies, you could make either.  Recipe for the French meringue is below.
   1. Whip 33g of the egg whites in your mixer and a pinch of egg white powder.  Continue mixing on low while you are completing step B.
   2. Put the 25g of water and 100g of sugar into a saucepan – slowly heat (if you do it too quickly, the sugar will burn).  Keep a bowl of cold water.  Dip your fingers in the water, then pick up some of the sugar/water mixture, then back in the water.  If the mixture turns solid/balls up, it is done heating.
   3. Slowly pour the sugar mixture into your mixer with the egg whites.  You don’t want to pour it into the whisk (this will cause all of the sugar to stick to the side of the bowl and not get incorporated), so try to pour it between the whisk and the side of the bowl.
   4. While it’s mixing, add your coloring.  Make sure you are using a color that’s made for water-based mixtures (I think the Wilton will work for anything).  You could also add flavor here – you could add a few drops of liquid flavor (like vanilla, almond, lemon), or something like freeze-dried fruit that has been blended into a powder (which will add flavor and color).  Mix until you get “bird peaks” – when you pull out the whisk, you should have a peak on it that looks like a bird’s beak or mountain.
5. Add 33g of the egg whites into the almond powder mixture and mix with a spatula to make a dough.
6. Add some meringue (from step 3) into the egg whites and almond powder and mix.  Add 2-3 times to finish. Mix until you have a “ribbon” when you pick up the spatula – the dough should continuously drip off of the spatula.  Don’t over mix it – if you do, the macaron will be flat when you pipe it onto the baking sheet and dry when you cook it.
7. Fill a piping bag with a size 8 tip.  An easy way to do this is to twist the tip and then stuff the bag into the tip.  Use a plastic bench scraper to pick up the dough.  Fold the bag over your thumb and forefinger.  Wipe the scraper onto the inside of the bag using your thumb (don’t worry about getting it into the bag all the way).  Once you have all of the dough in the bag, unfold the top, untwist the tip, and lay the bag on the table.  Take your bench scraper on the outside of the bag and push the dough down and the air out.  Voila – ready to pipe!
8. If you used the Italian meringue, pipe it onto a Silpat.  If you used French, use paper.  This is something we did wrong in the SLT class and I remember he had such a tough time getting them off of the sheet.  Same thing when we made them again!
9. Pick up the tray and drop it onto the table twice.  This gets the air bubbles out.
10. Put them in the oven and turn the oven down to 140 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes.  If you don’t do the preheat step, your macarons will look wavy.
11. Once the macarons are cool, move them to a cool tray with paper on it.  Wrap the tray and put in the freezer overnight (If you did French meringue, put them in the fridge).  I think you could keep it in the freezer for up to two weeks if you wanted.
12. When you are ready – you can eat just the biscuits or fill them with whatever you want!  Ganache, buttercream, Nutella, jelly – pretty much anything will work!

It’s definitely worth giving these a try – they aren’t as hard as you might think!  If you do, let me know how they turn out!