I had intended to make Hubby a plate of macaroon's as a Valentines Day gift... but neither of us was well that week, so the baking got a little delayed. For the first time in a while I had the kitchen all to myself when I set out on my second macaroon attempt, and I was very hopeful of producing a better result.
I started out, once again, by weighing out and sifting all of my dry ingredients, and then put them aside while I got cracking on the eggs.
Three egg whites get whisked until they form soft peaks, and then you pop in some caster sugar and whisk away until the sugar is dissolved. I love how glossy and incredibly white this mixture gets, although I get the feeling that I should have whisked them a little longer, and got the mix really stiff.
Next I folded in the dry ingredients until well combined. To be honest, this is probably my least favourite step - because I worry that I'm going to 'overwork' the mixture and loose the lightness.
Now for my second piping bag attempt. I felt a little more comfortable this time around - and got the mixture INTO the piping bag with far less mess than the last time which made me feel better. I will note though, I'm still having trouble getting the mixture OUT of the piping bag. I know it's just practice, but I'm still getting 'peaks' when I try to finish piping a macaroon out. This time round though, because my mixture was a little more runny, the 'peaks' did settle into the macaroon so I did have more smooth, round shapes.
This time I didn't dust the macaroons with cocoa before I put them in the oven, I just left them for 20 minutes (per the recipe) and then popped them in the oven. Now, the recipe says 20 minutes in the oven. I think this is wrong. In my parents-in-law oven last time, 15 minutes was too long. I'm aware that one side of our oven cooks hotter than the other, so I popped the macaroons in the oven for eight minutes, then opened the oven, rotated all the trays and left them for another eight. While I was on the right track, this was still a little too long. I'm starting to think they only need ten minutes all up.
Once everything was out of the oven, I set to work on the ganache. I didn't have sufficient dark chocolate for the recipe, so I supplemented with some Lindt milk chocolate with hazelnuts in I happened to have in the fridge (why not?).
I popped the cream on the stove on a medium heat until it just started boiling, then took it off the heat and threw in the chocolate and stirred til it all melted. I have to admit - I'm now a big fan of supplementing the dark chocolate with a portion of milk chocolate. It just seemed to give the ganache a smoother, less bitter taste. Then the ganache went into the fridge for about an hour to cool down and get to a good spreading consistency.
The final step was to spread the ganache onto one half of a macaroon and sandwich the other one on, and then resist the temptation to eat the left over ganache out of the saucepan (which I did! It's so hard to let chocolate go, but I can't just eat it melted out of a saucepan...).
These tasted awesome, and the consistency was SO CLOSE to being right. I'm not sure what it is I'm doing wrong, but they just don't look like macaroons. I even bought some to remind myself of how they should look:-
I think my two biggest problems this time were - I didn't whisk the egg whites long enough and I left them in the oven just a minute or two too long. At least my co-workers enjoyed them when I took them into the office the next day!
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