Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Macarons-test 2

macarons-just piped 2

Is this a sign I what I'll be doing in the coming year. Here's picture of some macarons batter, just piped out, waiting to set up to go into the the oven. I'm testing out another recipe of macarons with my niece.

My niece, the world traveller, or should I say the Northern Europe traveller, flew in from Sweden on New Years's eve from her semester aboard and is staying with us till January 6-ish where travels to upstate NY to almost Canada for last semester of school. Maybe we'll test out another batch of macarons. Maybe chocolate?

I guess we both have the baking bug, on her last visit, we made cheesecake. I had a feeling she would be into testing out this macaron recipe. 

For this test, I decided that I would make vanilla macarons with vanilla buttercream with raspberry jam. I made up a big batch of swiss buttercream and some raspberry jam--I even seeded it. 

Did some research of what to look for and how to tell if I'm over mixing the batter and how to tell that they are done. I watched Joy of Baking.com video for french macarons and decided to use her recipe. I also watched this video to make macarons without a mixer. It was helpful to see what to look out for in the batter--like it becomes shiny. 

My first test at macarons, I over mixed the batter and over baked it slightly. I also realized after this test that the larger macarons were the ones that cracked. 

My niece whipped up the egg whites and sugar then she folded the almond flour/powder sugar in. We shared the piping--I'm more used to piping things because all the cupcakes I make up. We waited 1/2 hour [I think it's because I keep my house so cold] for the batter to set before put it into the over. 

macarons-right out of oven
Here's what it looks like right out of the oven. It needed to cool before we filled it so we decide to go to Lohemann's to check out their clearance sale [$1, 5, 10 sale]

suess-y driving glove
Of course, I didn't find anything super cheap but I got few things that I needed. Here's my favorite thing I got--Suess-y stripe driving gloves with touch screen fingers so I can use with my iphone or ipad.

Back to the macarons, now that our 2 hours clearance shopping is done. The macarons are cooled and now to lift off the silicone sheets. This was a little stressful operation because the macarons were so delicate. I only drop one but it fell on one of the macarons. Luckily, it fell on it's mate and only one pair was cracked.

Here's the finish product. 
macaron close up

We got 12 filled cookies and only 3 were cracked. Those were the first that we tasted. They were so good that we tested another batch before my niece left for almost Canada [those came out even better]. We tried different versions of fillings--all chocolate ganache, chocolate ganache/raspberry and vanilla buttercream and raspberry. WG and niece like the buttercream version the best. Thinking of making up some blackberry jam and trying that as a filling.

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