Today I attempted macarons again. They were better … but not there yet.
This time I did a chocolate macaron with a raspberry buttercream in the middle. Can you guess what flavour profile my cake will have tomorrow …. 🙂
As with the bake yesterday, my 2nd tray came out better than the first. I know for sure that they had rested long enough, because they all had a good skin on them, but again the first tray had mostly cracked tops and very little foot.
I did some MORE reading about them as I was baking the 2nd tray and figured out that I probably hadn’t baked the first tray long enough, which was why there was no foot. None of the recipes I looked at told you how to know when the macarons are done! I did a search and finally found an article from the Chatalaine magazine website that talked about how to tell if they are done. For your information, if you touch the macaron and it moves around on its foot, it’s not done yet. Keep baking for 2 minutes at a time until it doesn’t move. That solved the foot problem.
This tray was much better and half of them looked perfect.
But the other half domed up and cracked a bit as well. That leads me to believe that I still didn’t get the mixing right.
In terms of flavour … they were pretty good but in a side by side comparison with the first ones, I liked the first one better. It mainly came down to the filling. I liked the texture of the ganache as well as it’s deep chocolate flavour better than the buttercream. I did see a recipe that used a raspberry-white chocolate ganache, so next time I would try that.
I will try them again sometime, because they are really delicious, but not this weekend. I’m done with macarons for a bit!
I like seeing the process of experimentation. But now I’m left wondering — what does the cake look like?? BTW, at Nadege, they make a fancy version of birthday cake ice cream by mixing chopped up macarons with vanilla ice cream. Seems like a good use for the imperfect ones.
I’m in the process of making the cake today so you’ll have to wait a day for the final pictures 😀
I saved the good ones for the cake and we have been enjoying eating the “ugly ones.” Ice cream is a good idea too!