Macarons

If I'm going to spend $5 on a portable dessert, I'd take a macaron over a cupcake any day.  Frosting, especially in equal amounts of cake, just isn't my thing.  Macarons have just a slick of jam or buttercream sandwiched between 2 light and chewy cookies, and they come in tons and tons of flavors.  Plus, they're cute.  Looks definitely count.  But perhaps most importantly, I can eat more than one.  And after having  the big mama of all macarons from Laduree in Paris and from a tiny macaron shop in Nice, I'm hooked. Both of which were hand carried all the way from France for me by my mom, by the way.  Thanks Mom!!

Surprisingly, I have made quite a few cupcakes, but not a single macaron.  I have made other cookie sandwiches, but I try to limit those.  I feel like eating two cookies at once with a filling is a little much.  I usually like to have my cookies by the pair, but if I eat two sandwich cookies, that's 4 cookies!  Hence the dilemma.

Macarons are different.  There's no butter or oil or shortening.  They are basically little chewy meringue cookies.  And they're flourless.  And there's almonds!  Healthy, right?  I think so.  Pratically health food status, if you ask me.  But while I've always enjoyed them, I've never really had much motivation to make them.  They seem too fussy.  Whisking egg whites.  Folding.  Piping.  Cooling. Sandwiching.  Too many dishes.  I prefer the single bowl chocolate chip cookies that involve scooping, dropping and eaten immediately out of the oven.

But at the risk of being a one trick pony, I buckled down and made me some chocolate macarons.  I blitzed the almonds in the food processor with the powdered sugar and cocoa powder.  Very important to do these altogether, as I found out.  Blitzing the almonds by themselves long enough will inevitably give you almond butter in no time.  And I whipped the egg whites with sugar.  So far so good.  And then came the piping.  I don't have the patience for piping.  And I think it wastes precious cookie batter.  I estimate that at least 3 cookies are lost in the pastry bag.  Cookie batter is a terrible thing to waste.  So I scooped them with my teeny-tinyest cookie scoop.  Apparently, it was not teeny tiny enough because my macarons baked up huge!

They look like whoopie pies!  The tops crackled slightly.  Not sure why.  Maybe over whipped egg whites.  And worst of all, most of them didn't have their little "feet".  I think maybe only the ones that baked first on the upper third rack grew some "feet".

See?  This one was ok.  Still big though.

So they were macarons for Paul Bunyan.  Despite their seemingly non-natural size, they tasted ok.  I'll have to try them again.  Maybe there is something to this piping business after all.