Monday, April 5, 2010

as promised... the ugly.

This is a macaron


Catlyn made this macaron.  Her first batch & first attempt.  It is what a macaron should look & taste like.  The smooth doomed cookie and tasty filling.  And they have feet!  See that lil ruffled edge of the cookie?  That is what makes this a proper macaron.  You get this by letting the meringue & almond meal cookie set out and get a skin before baking.

As you can see I am well versed in the concept of macarons.

Unfortunately knowing the concept of macarons does not translate into the ability to make macarons.  The following are picture from my first TWO failed batched of macarons.  The first of which looked amazingly like peacock poop, just lighter in color.  I know this because I worked a season at The Philadelphia Zoo and the place is lousy with free wandering peacocks.




We will never speak of this again.

3 comments:

  1. Awwwww.

    OK, I strongly encourage you to look at the Joe Pastry link I sent you. He goes into great depth about how stiff the batter should be before baking. Looking at your photos, I'm going to guess two things:
    - your batter was too stiff or had too many bubbles in it; it needed to be beaten a bit longer; the middle photo DEFINITELY looks like the batter was too stiff and didn't deflate into the nice dome shape the way it should
    - you piped them out too large; I did the same thing and it's easy to do

    I don't think the color of the macarons in these photos are all that off. They look like a nice ivory-ish color to me, which is good.

    It's just an excuse to bake more! Let's set up a time to do it at my place.
    Catlyn

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  2. I bet they were good, though. Food52 has a really good macaron video and I usually hate videos.
    http://www.food52.com/blog/617_meyer_lemon_macarons

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  3. Jackie - recently my friend who made the macaron at the top taught me how to make them and they came out perfectly (well close to it anyway). In a couple weeks I'll make a batch on my own and post it. fingers crossed!

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