Macarons are little french bundles of joy. They are delicious nutty meringue shells filled with a sweet icing inside. The perfect mix of chewy, crunch and sweetness. They are made from ground nuts, eggs, sugar and food colouring. They are also expensive retailing at around $1 per macaron and making them is time consuming as a few of the steps need resting for several hours before moving to the next one. You need almost 24 hours to make them to allow egg whites to rest overnight.
Making them can also be overwhelming as there are steps that require your judgement to determine if done. Identifying the macaronage is one of them. Working with a piping bag is also a skill that takes time and practice but I promise you no matter how odd any macarons look they will still taste delicious. Luckily Sally from Sally’s Baking Addition has done the hard work to create a Beginner’s Guide to French Macarons that I was able to perfect on my second go. She has great tips, pictures and videos that I recommend that you watch to identify the macaronage.
You don’t need too many fancy pieces of equipment to make these. My first batch I used a silicon macaron mat with imprints that caused the macarons to stick and I ended up throwing the mat in the bin!
Equipment you do need:
Two large bowls
Sieve
Scale
Electric mixer (I use my trusty Kenwood mixer with whipping attachment)
Blender (I used my thermomix to blend and mix together the icing sugar and almond meal that helped to mix the ingredients and much easier to pass through the sieve)
Piping bag
Large cup that will fit the piping bag (those large movie promo cups you get at the cinemas are the perfect size)
Large baking tins
Baking paper
Macaron shapes printed on paper – printing circles (or cactus’s) and placing them under your baking paper is a lot easier than drawing lots of them. Just remember to take them out before baking.
While you can eat macarons as they are, they also make a great addition to any cake as decorations. You can purchase an edible pen from most kitchen stores (I used Over the top black pens you can buy in a pack of two or a multi pack of ten different colours from Kitchen Warehouse). The pens can change an orange macaron into a basketball and a green macaron into a cactus.
My go to cake recipe for any event is the Messy Benches Chocolate Carrot Cake. The cake is super easy to make, the recipe can be doubled and the cake has a solid mud cake density which makes it great for decorating. It helps that is tastes delicious and kids and adults love it!
