Baking with Dragons: Macarons!

With plenty of free time on my hands, I decided to tackle the challenge of baking macarons. Apparently, macarons are extremely difficult to make considering the number of extra steps you have to take. I followed a recipe uploaded by BuzzFeed (link below) and I got pretty good results out of it. In the video, Alexis will make a lot of tips for each step so make sure to follow them as well.

Recipe: https://tasty.co/recipe/macarons

Ingredients:

Macarons (30)

1 ¾ cups powdered sugar

1 cup almond flour

1 teaspoon salt

3 egg whites, at room temperature

¼ cup granulated sugar

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

2 drops of any color gel food coloring

Vanilla Buttercream Frosting

1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks)

3 cups powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3 tablespoons heavy cream

1. First, make sure your butter and egg whites are at room temperature. Let the egg whites sit for at least 30 minutes before mixing them in.

Dry Ingredients:

1. If you have a food processor, use it! Pulse powdered sugar, almond flour, and salt. If you don’t have one like me, you can try to get the dry ingredients as fine as possible by sifting the ingredients with a sifter/strainer. I sifted the dry ingredients at least three times.

Wet Ingredients:

1. In a separate bowl, beat the room temperature egg whites with a pinch (1 tsp) of salt using a whisk or the whisk attachment of a hand mixer. Beat the egg whites until they become frothy and are no longer translucent.

2. Start adding the graduated sugar gradually—meaning a little bit at a time. Pour some sugar (but not all) into the bowl, and keep mixing for a bit. Then, pour more sugar again. If you add the sugar all at once you will deflate the mixture. Once you added all the sugar keep beating until you get stiff peaks. (2:11 in the video for visual)

3. Add your vanilla extract and two drops of gel food coloring. (*using a liquid food coloring can thin your batter out*) Gel food coloring gives a more vibrant color than liquid food coloring.

Combining the Ingredients

1. Add about ⅓ of the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients bowl. Then, you will macronage (the action of mixing the batter in a delicate, folding way). Using a rubber spatula, scoop at the bottom side of the bowl and twist it up, lifting the batter over. You want to do this aggressively to remove any air bubbles in the batter. (2:50 in the video for visual).

2. Keep folding and constantly checking your batter by doing the “Figure 8” method. You take your spatula with some of the batter and lift it up while doing a figure-8 motion. The batter is ready if you’re able to create a figure-8 without the batter breaking off. If the batter breaks off from your spatula without completing the full 8, keep mixing. (3:24 in the video)

3. Transfer the batter in a piping bag or a ziplock bag with a cut-out hole.

4. On your cookie baking pan, add four small dots of the batter in each corner to keep the parchment paper in place.

5. Pipe the batter until it is about 1 ½ inch wide. You can also just eyeball it.

6. Once you piped the batter, pick up the tray and drop it on the table around 5 times. This step is crucial because it will eliminate any air bubbles and create a smooth top on the cookie.

7. Let the macarons rest for 30 minutes to an hour before baking. If you don’t do this step the macarons will not rise properly.

8. Set the oven to 300 degrees F and bake the macarons for 17 minutes. Turn on the oven light to check your macarons instead of opening the oven. If you open the oven door, you can deflate the macarons. (***TIP: I noticed this while baking, use the TOP rack of the oven. I had two batches of cookies and I baked them together in separate pans. The pan on the top rack had smooth tops and looked perfect. However, the macarons at the bottom rack underneath the top pan were all CRACKED. I highly recommend baking each batch of cookies separately using the top rack of the oven***)

9. Once they are done baking, transfer the macarons to a wire rack to cool. If you don’t let them cool before filling them, the filling will melt and ooze off the cookie.

Vanilla Buttercream Filling:

1. While the macarons are cooling, beat the room temperature butter until it becomes fluffy.

2. Then, sift your powdered sugar into the mixture and combine.

3. Then add the vanilla and heavy cream.

4. Add the filling to a piping bag and add a dollop of filling that’s just a little smaller than the actual size of the cookie and sandwich the two cookies.

5. Keep filling all your cookies until you are done! It is suggested to wait a whole day before eating them, but you don’t have to.

As you can tell, making macarons is TOUGH work. It may seem intimidating to try, but I had a lot of fun making them. I hope you guys will take this challenge to make this popular dessert!

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I hope you guys have a great summer! It was fun writing articles for you guys :^)