Macarons: adventure between macawrongs & macarights

on another note, i've carried out an experiment with macarons in my kitchen! yes ..... the famous french macarons: bloggers are blogging about them, macarons 101 classes are conducted everywhere and sellers are selling these morsels online as well as offline. they are the in thing now, in malaysia (but have always been the in thing in other parts of the globe).

we usually get our supply from whisk, empire gallery. a small piece is rm2, quite pricey for something that one can gobble up in a single gulp.

so i googled up the recipe, and was surprised to learn that macarons are made from 4 main ingredients. only 4!!! only a few ingredients, but the technique will determine whether the macarons are macawrongs or macarights. i was intrigued, and suddenly had the urge to make it though unfortunately my kitchen lacks a few important gadgets to make macarons. stubborn as i can be, armed with my faithful hand mixer, i was determined to try out baking these based on the recipes that i got from the internet.

i learnt that there are 3 methods in making the macarons; the french meringue, italian meringue and swiss meringue. italian and swiss meringue require boiling a few ingredients up until a certain temperature and since i don't own (yet, hopefully!) a candy thermometer, i was left with using the french meringue method.

glossy beaten egg whites

piped and left to dry

Baking macarons can create dramas in the kitchen (unintentionally) for some bakers. Why? Because the main characteristic of a macaron is having little feet or skirt. There are a few other characteristics, google up and you can find many interesting blogs that show the anatomy of a macaron. Bakers would wait patiently in front of the oven, peeking every now and then to see whether the macarons have started developing feets or not. Well, that was me, for one. heh!

Alhamdulillah, mine developed feet without any trouble on that day, but another problem came up. according to the recipe, these were to bake at 350 F for 15-18 minutes. I lowered the temperature a bit from the recipe, but after 5 minutes, my macs started to look 'dark'. see, the problem with baking anything chocolatey is, it is difficult to gauge its doneness. ugh. so i waited a bit more, after 7 minutes or so, i felt it was totally not right (is there such thing as baker's instinct?), so i took it out. ohhh....damage has been done. my macs were burnt. huhu. sad, yes, so sad.i proceed with the fillings. frustrated with the burnt macs, so i changed my plan, did not do the planned filling, but instead i made chocolate ganache. ganache made was quite little, since i only have 50ml of heavy cream ... or was it the recipe yields too many macs? it says; yields 15 filled macs but i was sure i got many, many more than that! perhaps i should make bigger macs next time. so anyway, i refrigerate my ganache for a while and piped it on top of my macarons.

my plain macarons tasted alright, they are tasty if i could say despite their 'tanned' look. thank god. and together with the filling, it tasted even better! i can't believe it :) . my Montey said it tasted like Whisks'. yabedabedu!

yes, a few of my macs have tits ... oops!

the insides. left them to mature for about 2 +/- hours since we can't beat the temptation to eat them all, hihi

so that was my adventure, making macs for the first time without attending classes nor equipped with the essential gadgets. will i make this in the future? yes! and i hope i could try other methods as well. i also harbour a dream to taste pierre hermes and laduree's macarons one fine day :)

i was surprised by the length of this entry since i was a bit lazy updating blog these days... but i hope i'm not boring any of you out there!