Ingredients and Equipment

Here are the main ingredients I used when making the chocolate french macarons. If you get into this you will find so many instructions about what not to use and how to age your egg whites including leaving them in the refrigerator for a few days and then unwrapped in a bowl outside of the refrigerator for another couple of days. But I used egg whites from a container, and just put the correct amount in a bowl on the counter and let them come up to room temperature. The container of egg whites is 100% eggs whites, so no additives. I really hate throwing away the egg yokes if you use a whole egg and I don't need to make any more desserts then I am already making. It's hard to diet when you have to sample everything you cook.

The powdered sugar is organic and therefore has no corn starch in it. I didn't know nonorganic powdered sugar had corn starch until I started reading books about making macarons. I also use Bob's Red Mill Almond Meal, which is just ground almonds. I grind the amount I want to use again, but that is a lot easier than starting with whole raw almonds. I use regular sugar for beating with the egg whites. I've heard a rumor that you need beet sugar but I have just used Domino's and it works well.

Now for the equipment. I tried three times with a disposable pastry bag and I'm not too good at it yet. Then I found a metal pastry tube that is easier for me to handle. After two times of putting the batter in the top, watching it drip out the bottom, and thinking someone should have designed covers for the tips, I realized that I could unscrew the bottom completely and turn the whole thing upside down while filling. That works well and is not so messy. Click here for more information about this pastry tube.Wilton Dessert Decorator Pro

One chef has said not to bother to make these at home because they are just too complicated. We'll see. I'm not giving up. I did try to make pistachio macarons and they were nothing like the ones in Paris. They weren't good enough to share so I had to eat all of them. I'm going to do my best to fit in an opportunity to make the chocolate ganache ones again for Easter. Next blog entry I'll post all of David Lebovitz' recipe so you don't have to search his website.

Charming

Here are several from the fifth batch. I think these even look a little better than the first attempt did. I'm going to try to do this again soon. Maybe I can even make them more uniform in size, smaller is better, and maybe I will end up with more than 22 cookies. I brought most of them to a friend's for dinner last week and left all but two, knowing how proud my trainer would be that I left all that sugar behind, no pun intended. I keep thinking pistachio.

Fifth Time's the Charm

This past weekend I made chocolate macarons with chocolate filling, again using David Lebovitz' recipe. I like this filling better than the chocolate, prune, cognac filling. It's made with heavy cream, light corn syrup, semisweet chocolate, and butter. I baked them on parchment paper on good quality cookie sheets and only put one sheet in the oven at a time. The heat in my oven isn't even enough to risk baking two at the same time. And I managed to make 22 cookies in about an hour. This may not sound like much of an achievement but I haven't yet detailed what happened when I tried to make vanilla macarons. I'll save that for another day.

These macarons were really good! The center was soft and moist and the outside had a thin shell of meringue just like they are supposed to be. Wow. The filling was delicious. These were really good - I think I just said that.

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First Attempt Completed

Here they are. Looking a little messy but tasting pretty good. The recipe for the filling is on David Lebovitz's website and it is just 15 pitted prunes, 2.5 oz finely chopped milk chocolate and two tablespoons of cognac. I chopped the prunes in my food processor and they are a bit sticky and chunky. But after adding in the melted chocolate and the cognac it all smooths out. After the filling has cooled and the meringue cookies are completely cool, just add the filling to the flat side of one cookie and put another cookie on top.

The meringue cookies have ground almonds in them instead of flour. I used raw almonds and ground them in my coffee grinder. My food processor is somewhere between 25 and 30 years old and doesn't quite seem to have the power to grind up the almonds.

Since this first batch I have made macarons four more times. I have started using Bob's Red Mill Almond Meal/Flour and even though it is ground, I still grind it again in the coffee grinder. I have also learned that it is best to use organic powdered sugar because it does not contain cornstarch.

First Attempt

After deciding that I would learn how to bake french macarons, I discovered I already had a recipe for them. I have David Lebovitz' book "The Sweet Life in Paris" and he has one recipe for chocolate macarons. David was a chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. He wrote this book about living, eating, and cooking in Paris. It's really interesting and a good guide to the city, interspersed with great recipes.

I checked his website before I began and found he has a section on macarons and the techniques for making them as well as another recipe, one he said was more popular with his French friends. So that is the one I made - chocolate macarons with chocolate, prune and cognac filling. He says to use Armagnac for the cognac. I went off to the liquor store to get a small bottle and was told the only bottle they had cost $1,100.00. That can't possibly be right. Certainly would not be included in my first batch of macarons. I found a $3 mini bottle of Courvoisier, which I hoped would be adequate.

I made the cookies over Thanksgiving weekend. I was quite tense after reading about all the disasters possible and the importance of technique. What technique? You are supposed to use a pastry bag to make small circles with the meringue. I had never used a pastry bag. I bought a kit by Wilton with disposable plastic bags and a few different tips. This worked well except that as a new user my technique produced almost as much batter out the top of the bag as through the tip on the bottom. Eventually I got enough batter circles on the parchment paper on the cookie sheets and got the cookies in the oven. I finally relaxed a little when they were done and they each had the small footing on the bottom, characteristic of the macaron cookie. It's called the "pied." You can see this in the photo above. Two of these cookies will be put together with the chocolate filling to make the macaron.

If you decide to make this recipe, I have found that my oven cooks the macarons in about half the time of the recipe. I have also learned that Lebovitz' requirement of rapping the cookie sheets on the counter before you put them into the oven is essential. I slam them on the counter about three times before baking. It pops the air bubbles out of the meringue.

Life Altering

That was how french macarons were described to me before I took a trip to Paris in the winter of 2009. Hard to believe. A friend and I went searching for them at various bakeries. And finally got to the two famous pastry shops, Laduree and Pierre Herme. Oh my goodness. We ate those cookies on the street outside both shops, because we couldn't wait to get to the hotel or even a bench to sit down, to taste them. We swooned. We moaned. We wanted more. Those little cookies are amazing, and definitely life altering. They are nothing like the coconut macaroons that we know in the U.S. I decided that I had to learn how to make these. How difficult could it be? Three months after this trip and several tries baking them and I'll tell you they are not easy and they are labor intensive. But even the rejects taste good. I am not a cook by profession and have had many years of hardly cooking at all, but I like to bake and these are so good I thought it would be worth the effort.

What are they? Small meringue sandwich cookies with a creamy center. Any flavor can be added to both the cookie and the cream. Bigger is not better. There is something about the proportions with the smaller cookies that make them more delicious than the larger ones. Since returning from Paris, I have learned that they have become the new dessert craze in the U.S., replacing cupcakes. And, by the way, they are spelled with only one "o" even in English.