I may be a day late but hopefully I’m not a dollar short. I lost track of time yesterday and didn’t realize I hadn’t posted yet, so here is a slightly delayed post!
I think I mentioned in a post last year that I made macarons once, and they turned out rather well. I tride making macarons again over the winter holiday and due to mutliple issues: wrong size pan, missing equipment and a small cooking space, they all turned out either raw or burned. (you do not want to know how many times the fire alarm went off while I was trying to haul the macaron shells out of the oven, I’m still embarassed just thinking about it.)
Because of that I decided to give macarons another try, just to get over the reminder of failure. There is nothing as demoralizing as being constantly reminded that the last time you tried something you failed at it. Third times the charm, as they say!
The good news: the macarons came out (more or less) the way I wanted them to! They came out well baked with smooth tops and close to uniform size. After adding a filling they were all very tasty as well (I did a french buttercream with strawberry jam). My mom even liked the macarons, though she only liked the shells with no filling, so I’ll take that as a plus.
Bad news: I’m still a long way away from doing professional macarons. Aside from the occasional odd shaped macarons I don’t think I got them large enough. I actually bought baking sheets with the correct sizes for the macarons printed on them, but when it came time to actually use them I couldn’t find them anywhere. I’m going to be pulling everything out of my baking storage area to look for them but that won’t help me now. I think the main problem in the size is my piping technique. Who would have guessed that it would be so hard to make what is essentially a large dot of batter with a piping bag?
Perfect appearance or not there is one thing I’m happy about, and it’s the fact that they still taste good. I’ll probably have to make macarons a couple more times before I actually master the process but that doesn’t sound like too bad of a problem to have.
