Macarons

The finished macarons

So, I've been frantically, and unsuccessfully, trying to finish a few christmas presents before Sunday, so all my spare time has been spent doing those rather than blogging, but I did find time to make some macarons  on Wednesday AND THEY HAVE FEET!!!!!! For those of you not as excited as I am, they are a mark of a successful macaron and notoriously difficult to achieve - they're the ring at the bottom of the shells that you can see either side of the filling in the above photo. The feet may have been going slightly outwards and there might be a few difficulties with cooking times/temperature but I'm so happy that it worked and they tasted good. The last (first) batch I made nearly reduced me to tears, although that might have been the pricey Valhrona chocolate bars that I'd just wasted!

Ready to go in the oven

I'm not going to give you a recipe just yet as I haven't perfected them but I will practice more in the new year and tweak it before posting my version of the classic. To make these I followed Entertaining with Beth's video and recipe with Ladurée's macaron book for additional guidance in french (it counts as work then!) and so many sites telling me how not to go wrong that I've forgotten most of them, although I do remember Chocoparis' tips as being particularly helpful in telling me where I'd gone wrong so I could avoid it next time.

I used the Lékué macaron kit to help me make them the right size. I like the mats but they only just fit my oven so I had to place them directly onto a shelf and not a baking tray, which was interesting! The "decomax" was fun to use and a lot less messy than a piping bag. To be honest though, you could just use baking paper and an icing bag but I had such a bad experience with the shells sticking to the paper that I decided that silicone mats were the only way to go, even if they stuck a little because they were undercooked!

To post a comment click on the word comments, of click on the title and scroll to the bottom of the page to get to the form. Have you ever tried making macarons? How did they go?

Raspberry powder for taste

Mixing the almonds in

Ready to pipe

The cooked shells

A very pink filling

Photo shoot!