“Ca m’énerve tous les gens qui font la queue chez Ladurée
Tout ça pour des macarons à la Tourte
Mais bon…Il parait qu’ils sont bons”
-Helmut Fritz
The first thing you need to know is that my friend Louise is the macaron queen. Her macarons are better than a lot of macarons I’ve had in bakeries, that’s how good! We went to Paris together in the fall and one of our highlights was the Laduree macarons. I’ve never had such amazing macarons! So when we met up two weeks ago we thought we’d bring back memories from our lovely French excursion by making macarons together. She came over to my place and she taught me how to make macarons. It was a lovely afternoon and here’s how it went…
We used a recipe from Quebec chef Ricardo plus all of the tips Louise has accumulated in her experience of making macarons. The recipe makes 30 macarons.
Here are the ingredients you will need:
-1 cup (250 ml) of almond flour
-3/4 cup (180 ml) of icing sugar
-3 egg whites
-1/2 teaspoon (2.5ml) of food colouring (colour of your choice)
-1/2 cup (125 ml) of white granulated sugar
tip #1: Cookies for all different kinds of macarons have the same recipe (unless you want to go for something out of the box)! yay! You just add food colouring that fits with the kind of macarons you want to make. We had our hearts set on rose water macarons so we decided on pink.
1) We started by blending the almond flour and the icing sugar into a fine powder in a food processor for 2-3 minutes. Every minute or so we stopped to fold the powder with a spoon to make sure it mixed perfectly all the little bits.
2) Pass the powder through a sieve. Then place on the side for later.
3) Separate the egg whites. Difficult in my opinion, but Louise was very good at it!
4) In a different bowl, we whipped the egg whites with the food colouring, while gradually adding the sugar. Whip until you get firm peaks, which means they should stand by themselves. You are basically making a meringue, in other terms.
5) Using a spatula, fold in the almond/icing sugar powder into the meringue until it falls softly.
And your cookie batter is ready!
6) It’s now time to pipe!
Louise had some templates to make the cookies the perfect size, but they should be about 1-inch.
tip #2 : You should let them dry at room temperature for about an hour. That is very important because it helps create a crust on top of the batter which will make a nice round cookie. If the surface breaks while in the oven it probably means you didn’t let them rest long enough.
tip #3: Louise hit the pans a couple of times on the table, which helps take the air out of the batter, which would in result help them not be too hollow.
7) Now it’s time to put them in the oven at 325 F. They bake for about 12-15 minutes.
tip #4: It’s good to keep a good circulation of air in the oven. You can even leave the door of the oven open with the aid of a wooden spoon to help the circulation.
While your cookies are in the oven you might want to make the filling – which depends on your tastes. Although it’s good to keep an eye on your cookies!
Even though we had our hearts set on rose macarons, we forgot the rose water for the filling! Next time then! So instead we went for a whipped cream and white chocolate filling. There are sooo many different recipes, you can really go crazy (i.e. pistachio, cherry, kiwi, strawberry rhubarb, etc.)!
8) Once the filling is done, and once you’re cookies have completely cooled off, it’s time to put your macarons together! You simply put the filling in the middle of one cookie and press a second one on top and there it’s ready!
Now it’s time to eat!
tip #5: Macarons taste even better the next day!
tip #6: It’s better to eat them at room temperature, so take them out of the fridge for a good 20minutes before stuffing your face.
tip #7: You can keep the macarons for up to two weeks in the fridge.
