RECIPE: “operation macarons”

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, our mission for Sunday was to make macarons. One of Mike’s best friends was my partner in crime and all week he was busy researching the perfect recipe! By the time Sunday came around we were convinced that our our homemade version of the little delights were going to blow away the competition (aka Ladurée). Oh boy, were we wrong! If any of you have ever made macarons yourself, you probably know what I am talking about … Let’s just say that after 4 hours in the kitchen, and mediocre results, we both decided that we would leave it to the pros next time. In all honesty, I can’t even tell you what exactly we did wrong, we made 3 entirely separate batches (new batter for each) and each batch turned out differently … basically if you beat the egg for 30 seconds too short, they won’t turn out. If there is 1 gramm of extra sugar, they won’t turn out. If you don’t let them rest for the perfect amount of time before baking, they won’t turn out … you get the point, right? In all fairness though, they do taste pretty great! Especially after having them in the fridge over night. So really, we just need to work on the looks – but I think for now I’d rather buy some, than try again 🙂

For the basic macaron recipe we found this super helpful blogpost and used that exact recipe. We made 3 different flavors: cocoa with dark chocolate filling, vanilla with white chocolate vanilla filling and a pink macaron with mandarin lemon filling. Each of the fillings are actually super easy, you basically make a chocolate ganache (ie. 100gr. of dark chocolate with 100ml heavy cream), let it cool in the fridge for a minimum of 30 minutes and the fill the macarons with it. For the other 2 fillings with melted white chocolate with a bit of heavy cream and added vanilla for one, and fresh mandarin juice, as well as lemon zest for the other.

PS. a huge thanks to Katja for letting us use her macaron baking sheets and cook book ♥