Daring Bakers October: A tale of two macaron recipes

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

We have made macarons quite a few times before, but were nevertheless excited when learning about this month's Daring Bakers' challenge. I mean, a) macarons are delicious; b) the possibilities for creativity are endless; and c) it's always fun to try out a new recipe.

The first time we made macarons, we used a recipe from Tartelette. The result wasn't bad for first-timers, but they weren't perfect. The next time, we tried the recipe from our guru for all things sweet, Jan Hedh in his book Passion för Desserter (Passion for Desserts). That's the recipe we have used since, and it has yielded some really good results, and we have even been a bit daring with it.

But what's a good macaron like? Before starting to make them ourselves, we had never had a macaron, so in reality we didn't really know how they're supposed to be in order to be perfect. But a few weeks ago, we got the answer, and it was given to us by no other than the famed Pierre Hermé. Markus went to Paris for a work conference, and "skipped class" to go to Hermé's store and pick up a box of assorted macarons. Unfortunately they got a bit compromised by traveling, so they didn't look perfect, but the taste... oh dear god, how delicious! There was 12 different flavors (two of each!), all delicious. Markus liked the champagne one best, I fell in love with the olive oil and vanilla (sounds weird, but the flavor was so delicate), and we both let out a big sigh of pleasure when biting into the fleur de sel caramel. We didn't take any pictures, but if you want to see what Pierre Hermé's macarons are like you can take a look at this post on Nook & Pantry. We had quite a few of the flavors described there.

So now we know what a perfect macaron is like. Would Claudia Fleming's recipe lead us to that holy grail of pastry making?

It's sometimes hard to stop yourself when coming up with macaron flavors but we limited ourselves to two, probably quite original, flavors: Gingerbread & Blue Cheese macarons and Tiramisu macarons.

By coincidence, we started with the gingerbread macarons. We could tell that there was trouble afoot when we were making them - the proportions seemed kind of odd, and the macaronage (the batter) did not behave the expected way when Markus piped it. Also, the temperatures and baking times seemed a bit strange. In the private forum of the Daring Bakers, I found that Clumbsy Cookie shared my apprehensions about temperatures and timings. As Clumbsy is a lady who knows her way around the sweet stuff, I followed her adjustment of times and temp's, and baked for 6-7 minutes at 170°C and then for three more minutes at 150°C.

Aaaaaand... fail!



These aren't macarons, people. They were, however, very tasty - kind of a chewy meringue cookie. Actually, they were so tasty that I forgot to take a picture of them with the filling before eating them all!

We still had the batch of tiramisu macarons to make, and we agreed that we didn't want to waste more ingredients and time on a recipe that could fail us again. You see, we make our own almond flour for macarons, a time-consuming process which involves:

1. blanching almonds
2. peeling them
3. drying the peeled almonds in the oven for about 1 hour at low temperature (100°C)
4. letting them cool
5. grinding them in our very efficient but kind of small almond mill
6. sifting the almond meal to make sure it's very fine
   

Our awesome almond mill. Thanks grandma!

Yes, I realize the truly daring thing would have been to give Claudia Fleming's recipe another go, but instead we decided to use Jan Hedh's recipe for the second kind of macarons, and figure out what the differences between them are.

So, here's the macarons we made using Jan Hedh's recipe. They're not perfect (we think the most perfect macarons we've made are the lavender ones which can be found in this post), but they're like a 1000 percent better than the above pictured fiasco!



So, what's the differences between the two recipes?

1. Proportions of ingredients: See the interactive recipe scaler below. In short, the largest difference is the amount of sugar, where Jan Hedh's recipe calls for much more per egg.
   
2. Drying before baking: Hedh's recipe calls for drying the piped out shells at room temperature for 15-30 minutes before baking them.
3. Baking time and temperature: The official recipe called for 93°C for 5 minutes, followed by 190°C for 7–8 minutes while Jan Hedh called for 7–8 minutes in 170°C.
   

To make the ingredient comparison more clear, Markus made an interactive ingredient scaling Javascripty thingy (fingers crossed, and hope it's working).

The official recipe

5		Egg Whites
225	g	Confectioner's Sugar
190	g	Almond Flour
25	g	Sugar

Jan Hedh's recipe

100	g	Egg White
200	g	Confectioner's Sugar
100	g	Almond Flour
30	g	Sugar
5	g	Lemon Juice

Now, let's talk about flavors!

Gingerbread & Blue Cheese macarons
Gingerbread and blue cheese may sound like a weird combination, but a slice of blue cheese on top of a Swedish gingerbread cookie (pepparkaka) is a very popular treat in Sweden during advent and Christmas, often served with a glass of hot glögg. We flavored the shells with four teaspoons gingerbread spice mix (ginger, cinnamon, cloves and cardamom), which gave a perfect gingerbread taste to the shells, and made a blue cheese cream for filling. These were really tasty, and we'll definitely make them again for the holiday season - actually they were so good that we made a second batch, using the Jan Hedh recipe. After all, we still had some filling left.



Blue cheese filling
140 g firm blue cheese (we use Swedish Kvibille Ädel, similar to Danish blue cheese)
75 g whipped cream

Mix the cheese and the whipped cream. The way to get a uniform, smooth cheese cream is to cut the cheese into smaller pieces and chuck them in the freezer the day before. Then you give the frozen cheese a good whirl in a food processor until you have very fine cheese crumbles. Mix them with the whipped cream. Smear between two gingerbread macaron shells.

Tiramisu macarons
Tiramisu is one of our favorite desserts: savoiardi (ladyfinger) biscuits dipped in coffee and layered with an Amaretto flavored mascarpone zabayone. We made coffee flavored macaron shells, and used the mascarpone zabayone for filling. We were out of Amaretto, but since macarons already are almond flavored, it didn't really matter. However, we added a bit too much coffee powder to the macaron shells - we used 1½ teaspoon, but really one teaspoon would have been enough. Apart from that, these were good. We had planned to dust the shells with some cacao powder before baking them (tiramisu is decorated with a dusting of cacao), but we forgot. Instead, we dusted some cacao over the filling before sandwiching the cookies together.



Mascarpone zabayone
1 egg, divided
2½ tbsp sugar
100 g mascarpone cheese

Whip the egg white to stiff peaks. Whip the sugar and egg yolk until the mixture is light and airy. Stir in the mascarpone. Fold in the egg whites carefully. Place in the fridge so that the mixture sets before filling the macaron shells. If you like, you can dust a little bit of cacao powder over the filling.

Thank you Ami for this challenge! Even though we didn't succeed with the Claudia Fleming recipe, we had fun making this. Make sure to visit the Daring Kitchen for recipes, pictures and lots of other good stuff, and pay a visit to other Daring Bakers through the blogroll!

3x macarons

No, not triple x macarons (what on earth would those be like?) but three kinds of macarons for my triple x birthday! That's triple x as in Roman numerals - get your mind out of the gutter! :)

Yeah, the big day was Saturday, and I requested three kinds of macarons for the celebration with the parents. The flavors I came up with was an autumn-y apple-cinnamon-caramel, a sophisticated lavender-vanilla, and a fresh raspberry-lime.



Apple-Cinnamon-Caramel macarons
These are made by adding cinnamon to a normal almond shell recipe, and are filled with a combination of apple compote and caramel sauce. They taste like apple pie, with a slight burnt sugar note from the caramel.

Cinnamon macaron shells
100 g egg whites
30 g sugar
100 g ground almonds
200 g confectioner's sugar
dash of lemon juice
2 tsp cinnamon (heaped)

Sift the ground almonds and confectioner's sugar into a large bowl. Add the cinnamon and mix well. Whip the egg whites and lemon juice to a foam, add the sugar and whip it to a soft meringue. Fold the meringue into the dry mixture without overworking it. Pipe small rounds on a parchment covered baking sheet (use a round tip). Let them sit for at least 30 minutes before baking at 175°C for 7–8 minutes.

Apple compote
500 g apples
100 g sugar
20 g lemon juice (20 ml)
1 small cinnamon stick

Peel the apples and remove the cores. Slice them thinly and put in a pan together with sugar, lemon juice and a cinnamon stick. Boil on low heat until you have a thick compote. Let it cool completely. Remove the cinnamon stick, and use a mixer or an immersion blender to turn the compote into a smooth puree.

Caramel sauce
120 g sugar
1 tsp lemon Juice
300 g cream

Melt the sugar and lemon juice in a pan until you have a light brown caramel. Add the cream little by little and boil until the caramel is dissolved. Let it cool, transfer to an airtight container and store in the fridge. The sauce will thicken as it cools.

Assembly
Mix equal parts of apple compote and caramel sauce. Taste to see if you want more apple flavor, or more caramel. Spread the apple-caramel filling between the cinnamon macaron shells.



Lavender-Vanilla macarons
These are lavender flavored shells filled with French vanilla buttercream. The idea was to make them a soft, blueish color - like in the Swedish flag macarons - but we had forgotten how much food coloring to use... So: if you pour in one teaspoon of liquid blue food coloring, you will get these very bright, kind of turquoise colored macarons. Not what we aimed for, but at least the taste was delicious. Besides the somewhat in-your-face coloring, these were the macarons that ended up looking the best. Nice uniform size, perfect "feet", no "peaks".

Lavender macaron shells
Use the recipe above, but instead of cinnamon you add half a tablespoon of dried lavender. Bash the flowers up using a mortar and pestle before adding them to the almond-sugar mix. If you want to use blue food coloring to get a lavender-colored cookie (or a bright turquoise one!), you should add it while whipping the egg whites. (Note! That is if you use liquid food coloring - I have no experience using powders, but visit Tartelette for professional guidance.)

French vanilla buttercream
80 g egg yolks (about 4)
½ vanilla bean
60 g water (60 ml)
125 g sugar
250 g unsalter butter, at room temperature.

Whip the egg yolks until they are light colored and airy.
Split the vanilla bean, scrape out the seeds and put them in a small pan. Add water and sugar, and bring to a boil. Use a wet pastry brush to brush down the sides of the pan, this will remove any sugar crystals that have stuck there. Boil until a sugar thermometer reads 117°C.
Add the sugar mixture to the egg yolks, while whisking constantly.
Continue whisking until the mixture is cool. Add the butter little by little, and whisk until the buttercream is light and airy. The buttercream can be frozen.



Raspberry-Lime macarons
Here I want to quote the lady with the most mouth-watering blog of the pastry blogosphere, Tartelette. She has this to say about flavoring macaron shells:

One of the trickiest thing to do with macarons is to flavor the shells without messing up the texture. Adding liquid to the batter is to me like jumping off a plane wishing your parachute is going to work properly.

Our parachute didn't work this time. Adding liquid has worked for us before, but this time, we got a visit from Murphy when trying to make raspberry flavored macarons using raspberry puree. The macarons ended up misshapen, and had a very unmacarony texture - more like a fluffy meringue. At least the flavor was great; they really taste of raspberries and despite their sad look I kind of fell in love with their girly pink color (helped by a drop or two of red food coloring).

I won't give you the recipe since they need to be perfected. For the lime curd, see this recipe for lemon curd, but use the zest of two limes and lime juice instead.


From top to bottom: good macaron, bad macaron, good macaron, bad macaron!

Bananaramacarons

Due to a recent, not yet blogged about, food event we discovered that you can actually grind banana chips and use them in cooking. As so often happens to us of late, we started wondering if there might be a way to use this knowledge to pervert macarons, and it turns out there is! This one, like the snickerons, is based on already available candy. At least in Sweden we have these banana shaped thingies (about as big as my pinkie), tasting like banana marshmallows covered in chocolate, called “skumbananer”, which means foam bananas. Now, the easy way to make these would be to make chocolate macaron shells and some banana flavored filling, but then we wouldn't use the banana chips, so we did it the other way around instead! Granted, macaron shells made of banana chips is a bit experimental, but since we decided to blog about it, it either turned out fine, or spectacularly failed. Either way it's worth reading the rest of the post, right? :-)

So, for the shells, we decided to substitute some of the almonds for banana chips, it ended up being about 70 % of the almonds that were substituted, giving a recipe along these lines:

200 g Confectioner's Sugar
100 g Egg whites
30 g Sugar
30 g Almonds
70 g Banana chips

Scold and grind the almonds, grind the banana chips, and mix the two in a large bowl with the confectioner's sugar. Whip the egg whites and sugar into a light meringue (soft peaks), and fold it all together. Don't over work it! Use a plain tip pastry bag to make small rounds on parchment covered baking sheets and let them sit for at least 30 minutes before baking at 175°C for 7 minutes.

Let the shells cool before prying them off the baking sheets.

Now, having made the macaron shells is really only half the story, but I wont give you any recipe for chocolate creme here, just use whatever you like. Any ganache will work like a charm. Jenny made a plain dark chocolate one (cream and dark chocolate, period) for me to fill these ones with. As you can see from the pictures, it's a bit runny, but will probably stiffen up after one more day in the fridge.

So far so good, now for the $10k question: will it fly? Certainly not, but metaphorically speaking it might make you take off if you're really into that whole foam banana taste. It's really weird, but the banana chips make the shells more airy and lighter, like foam. I know we sort of had this in mind, but we didn't really expect it to work this well... ah well, you take the good with the rest! Fingers crossed they'll even make it through the freezer. Which they did (I'm writing this post anachronistically, the beauties in the pictures have actually been frozen and then thawed)!



Just a note on pronunciation of the title: it's obviously a contraction of Bananarama (a band which is incidentally as old as Jenny, alluding to the flavors involved) and macarons, but how should it be pronounced? There's two possibilities: bananarama-carons or bananara-macarons, and I personally prefer the first one. Don't know what “carons” are, but this way they at least taste good!

Swedish flag macarons

So, this was an idea we had for our equivalent of Independence Day, which it technically is: the modern day Kingdom of Sweden was founded on June 6th 1523. Having been an independent nation for almost 500 years, it's somewhat taken for granted nowadays... but since it's been a day of historical importance throughout the years, other noteworthy events have been scheduled for this date, such as the 1809 Instrument of Government, which provided legislative power to parliament and freedom of expression and press. June 6th is sometime called “Day of the Flag” here, so in honor of that, we decided to make macarons in the colors of the Swedish flag. Now how do you get macarons to be blue and yellow? And what's this post doing long before June 6th?

None of us is going to be home for June 6th, so we decided to skip the date, and just make blue and yellow macarons (I'll be on a conference in Boulder, Colorado May 31st–June 7th if anyone happens to be in the neighborhood).

Now, blue and yellow macarons, preferably with a Swedish connection... As you've perhaps noted, I make a killer lemon curd that's excellent for filling, and which is also yellow. So, how to make blue shells? Why, flavor them with bilberries! Bilberries are called “blåbär” in Swedish, which literally translates into “blue berries”. There's endless confusion between blueberries and bilberries, but both are more or less blue... probably have to help the shells with some coloring though...

For the lemon curd, see this recipe. And for the bilberry macaron shells you need:

200 g Confectioner's Sugar
100 g Almonds
100 g Egg Blues
1 tsp Lemon Juice
30 g Sugar
1 dl Frozen Bilberries
Liquid Blue Food Coloring

Wait a minute, egg blues? What's that? Well, basically blue egg whites... and in anticipation of future genetic improvements of domesticated birds, we have to rely on egg whites and liquid food coloring. It's hard to give exact measurements of how much food coloring is needed, but the before and after pictures below gives a hint of what to aim for.

So, to make the shells, start by making the bilberry jam. Heat the berries in a pan, they will start to disintegrate and leak, which is fine, we're aiming for something jam-like here. Let them reduce for a while, and then cool. Purée the bilberries through a strainer to get rid of the peels. Since the shells are teeming with sugar anyway, we opted to make the jam altogether sweetener-free.

Grind the almonds to a flour. We have a purpose-built mill, but a food processor might work as well, or maybe you can get almond flour at your local store? Mix the almond flour with sifted confectioner's sugar in a large bowl.

Whip the egg blues and lemon juice. Add the sugar and whip it to a meringue. Fold in the bilberries.


Egg blue meringue in the making

Fold the meringue into the almond mix without over-working it. Use a plain tip pastry bag to squeeze out small rounds on parchment covered baking sheets. Let them sit at room temperature for at least ½ hour before baking for 7–8 minutes at 175°C. Let the shells cool before removing from the parchment. The shells keep well in the freezer, but won't make it more than about a day in room temperature. To assemble, just put some lemon curd between two equally sized shells.

In hindsight, we probably should have gone for more bilberries and less food coloring, but there might be a June 6th next year as well...


Swedish flag macarons

Snickerons

After a recent fit of innovation it dawned on me that if you could make pistachio macarons, you probably could use other kinds of nuts, and as peanuts aren't really nuts they should work as well (there's no logic there, just creative thinking). Since it's possible to make peanut macarons (by creative inference), and also chocolate ones, you could take one of each shell and stick caramel cream between them and have something that's kinda like a snickers bar. The natural name for this thing would of course be “snickerons” – hence the title of this post. I sincerely hope we do not offend the French nation by blatantly dragging the crown of French pastry mastering into the cheap filth of American mass consumerism. I mean, that's what we're doing, we're just hoping no one takes offense... :-)

So, the three components needed are peanut and chocolate macaron shells and caramel cream.

Macaron shells
100 g Egg whites
30 g Sugar
100 g Ground Almonds
200 g Confectioner's Sugar
dash of Lemon Juice

Mix the ground almonds and confectioner's sugar in a large bowl. Whip the egg whites and lemon juice to a foam, add the sugar and whip it to a soft meringue. Fold the meringue into the dry mixture without overworking it. Pipe small rounds on a parchment covered baking sheet (use a round tip). Let them sit for at least 30 minutes before baking at 175°C for 7–8 minutes.

Chocolate macaron shells
Substitute 20 g of confectioner's sugar with 20 g powdered cocoa. Add a light touch of green food coloring to get a more chocolaty color to the finished shells.

Peanut macaron shells
Substitute half of the almonds with peanuts. Make sure they're roasted and unsalted. The only ones I could get that matched those criterion were unpeeled Raffles style peanuts (the Long bar at Raffles Hotel is home to the Singapore Sling, and the shells of the complimentary peanuts are supposed to be discarded on the floor – colonially decadent and barbaric, but fun), which makes for some gruesome peeling... the things we do for treats!


Peanut macaron shells fresh out off the oven

Caramel cream
120 g Sugar
1 tsp Lemon Juice
300 g Cream

Melt the sugar and lemon juice in a pan. Add the cream little by little and let it absorb. When all the cream is in the pan, give it a quick boil up and then strain it into something that you can cover up and put in the fridge. Cover up and put into the fridge. :-)

Assembly
Put some caramel cream between two different kinds of shells. Enjoy!


The finished snickerons

It actually worked. They taste somewhat like a snickers bar, only better. I think it needs more peanut though, so I'll try adding some salt in between (to lift the peanut flavor), or add some chopped regular (roasted and salted) peanuts. I guess the salt could have been added to the caramel cream, that would probably have worked out beautiful.

Another thing about following fits of inspiration is that you rarely stop to think things through, which I've had time to do now, and I really don't know why I made two shells... could've just made chocolate flavored peanut shells and caramel cream.

Guess that's the next iteration of this insanity: salt caramel cream and chocolate flavored peanut macaron shells. Or do you need almonds to call it macarons? Never mind – we're calling them snickerons anyway!

Macarons for Dad

Having worked up a taste for macarons in this post, a follow up was destined to come sooner or later. The perfect opportunity turned out to be dad's birthday. He's got pretty much everything he needs, and is somewhat of a sucker for sweets, so as far as presents go it should work like a charm. Besides, parents are supposed to appreciate anything their kids (even those above the age of 30) make for them, so no matter how it turns out I'm safe.. right? :-)

I decided to make pistachio macarons, and somewhat unorthodoxly fill them with lemon curd. This time, the two recipes are from Jan Hedh's Passion för Desserter (‘Passion for Desserts’, sometimes Swedish is remarkable easy to rewrite into English...) Compared to last time, the biggest difference is baking time and heat.

I think they turned out much better than last time, but I've only ever tasted macarons I made myself, so I don't know if I'm much of a judge on the matter. Judging from online sources, it does however seem to me that these are closer to what the blogosphere considers good macarons.

Here are some pictures, recipes are further down. It's a pity I have to hold this post until they're delivered... :-/


Good lining, right amount of curd...


Fairly smooth surface, nice color (although not very reminiscent of pistachios)

Pistachio Macarons
200 g Confectioner's Sugar
50 g Almond
50 g Pistachios
100 g Egg Whites (if they've been sitting out in the fridge for a few days that's even better)
1 tsp Lemon Juice
30 g Sugar

Ground the nuts into a flour. Preheat the oven to 170°C. Mix the nut flour and the confectioner's sugar in a bowl. Whisk the egg whites and the lemon juice in anther bowl. Add the sugar and beat it into a meringue. Fold in the dry stuff, don't over-work it. Use a plain tipped pastry bag to make 2–3 cm rounds on parchment covered baking sheets. Let them sit out for 15–30 minutes before baking for 7–8 minutes. Let them cool.

Lemon Curd
1 sheet Gelatin
3 Eggs
150 g Sugar
75 g Lemon Juice
zest from 1 ½ Lemon
100 g Unsalted Butter

Let the gelatin soak in cold water. Whip the egg and half of the sugar fluffy. Bring the rest of the sugar, the butter, the lemon juice and the lemon zest to a boil. Pour the lemon mix over the egg mix while whisking. Mix thoroughly. Pour everything back into the pot and bring it carefully to a near boil experience. Keep whisking all along. Take it off the heat and whisk it smooth. Squeeze the gelatin and let it dissolve in the curd. Strain it into a plastic container and cool quickly in a cold bath. Let it sit in the fridge for a while to harden.

Monday Macaron Madness

Do you know what a good activity at 9.30 pm on a Monday evening is? We do: it's making macarons for the first time! Crazy? Guess it fits us then... :-)

We figured we'd start off easy and try a plain almond macaron with dark chocolate ganache for filling. So, we need a chocolate ganache and some macarons! Here's how we made them:

Chocolate ganache
125 g Cream
100 g Dark chocolate (70%)
20 g Honey
1 tbsp Havana Club Añejo Especial (Cuban rum)

Chop the chocolate finely (go ahead, be as masochistic as me and do it by hand, or use a mixer). Add the rum to the chocolate. Mix the cream and the honey in a pot and bring it to a near-boil experience. Pour the cream mixture over the chocolate and fold it together. Let it stabilize in the fridge.

Macarons
We basically ripped one of Tartelette's excellent recipes. Although it originally called for pistachios we just substituted them for even more almonds.

90 g Egg Whites (about 3)
30 g Sugar
200 g Confectioner's Sugar
110 g Almonds

Mix the confectioner's sugar and almonds to a fine powder. Whisk the egg whites and add the sugar gradually until a meringue is formed. Fold in the almond/sugar powder until the whole batter has a “magma-like” consistency. Use a pastry bag with a plain tip to pipe 2 cm rounds on a parchment covered baking sheet (or two in our case). Let them sit and harden for 30–60 minutes before baking them in 130°C for 20 minutes (or longer if you made them bigger). Actually, make it longer and make them bigger, that's what Tartelette (a.k.a. The Macaron Queen of the Blogosphere) does... Let them cool before assembly. Supposedly, they survive well in the freezer, and two baking sheets of macarons is quite alot if you're not having guests over. We'll have to get back to you about that though, we're definetly shoving some of them in the freezer before assembly.

Assembly
Just put them back-to-back with some filling in between! Oh, and enjoy with a glass of milk – it goes great with the sweet and chocolaty macarons!


Mmm, this looks yummy...


...let's move in for a closer look!

Also, having made macarons we feel that there should be some sort of rite of passage into a new stage of our blogospheric career, so if anyone knows of a graphic or something to proclaim that we are “amateur food bloggers with macaron capabilities,” please comment!