Macaroon Madness - Part 1

I love macaroons.  Really.  Ever since I had my first macaroon in Paris, and savoured every mouthful, I have loved them.  In Nice I made myself sick eating them.  In Provence I won a bet with my husband the prize was... you guessed it - a macaroon.  So it comes as no surprise that they would definitely tempt me into the kitchen.

Now, let's just get this straight.  This is the blog of a Wannabe Cook, not a Wannabe Pasty Chef.  I enjoy baking, and the point of this blog is to learn a new skill, not continue baking treats that go straight to my bum, so baking posts will, by necessity, be kept to a minimum.  But the challenge of making macaroons is proving a little consuming.

More to the point.... with the devastating floods in my home city, over the last few days Hubby and I headed to his parents house so that he could continue to work remotely with his office's BCP with no threat of power outages.  My office doesn't have a BCP, so I went along because since the flooding started, I refuse to go anywhere without him.

Yesterday morning was rainy and dreary, so with hopes of the skies clearing eventually, and a new (thank you Father-In-Law!) piping bag to test out, my cousin and I decided to have a baking day.  I choose chocolate macaroons and Cousin chose cranberry chews.  On the advice of my neighbour, I have invested in The Australian Women's Weekly Macaroons & Biscuits magazine.  It's a great magazine, and I highly recommend it.

I started out by sifting all my dry ingredients, icing sugar, ground almonds, cocoa into a bowl.  It took help from Cousin and Mum-In-Law to do this - the icing sugar was a little old and had set in hard big lumps! 

While I was busy sifting, Cousin popped 3 egg whites into Mum-In-Law's Kenwood (I SOOOO want one of these) and set them mixing until the soft peaks formed.  Then I popped it the caster sugar and set it going again until the sugar had dissolved.

I carefully folded the sifted dry ingredients into the egg whites in two batches, until combined.

Next, (and the biggest test for me) I put the mixture into my brand new piping bag and attempted to pipe 4cm rounds onto oven trays covered in baking paper.  I have to say, using a piping bag is HARD.  If anyone has any tips on how to pipe smooth rounds, I'd love to hear them.

The next step is to dust the rounds with extra sifted cocoa powder, tap the trays to knock any air bubbles out and then let them rest for 30 mins.  My Father-In-Law has the cutest oven timer - it's a fat little chef and I got a real kick out of using it (and wearing his proper stripy chef's apron).

After resting, the macaroon's went into the oven for 20 minutes at 150 degrees Celsius.  While they baked, I put 60ml (1/4 cup) of cream into a small saucepan and brought it to the boil.  Once boiling, I pulled it off the heat and then dropped into 150g of dark chocolate into it and stirred it like mad until it was smooth and glossy.  I have to admit, Hubby got a bit of a telling off for sneaking pieces of chocolate before we worked out that we had more than enough to bake with and snack on.

The ganache went into the fridge until the macaroons were out of the oven and had cooled down.  Here's a pic of my pre-filled macaroons.

Once they were cool, and the filling had set a little, I started smearing chocolate filling onto the macaroons and sandwiching them together.

As you can see from the above photo, my macaroons don't really look like macaroons.  My two biggest problems were:-

• I couldn't get the knack of the piping bag, so instead of flat little rounds, I had peaked little rounds.
• I overcooked the macaroons.  They should have come out of the oven five minutes before I did take them out.  While they tasted great, they just weren't as moist as they should have been.

To me, this was a fail (albeit a tasty fail). If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.