So for my first attempt at making French-style macaroons I went to the Internet and looked up a few recipes. They all had the same basic ingredients: almond flour, powdered sugar and egg whites. It seemed simple enough. No sweat. I chose one recipe to try. I honestly can't remember which recipe I used and it doesn't really matter, because I only had about 1/2 c. of almonds, so I ended up altering the recipe. Bad idea. I started by grinding almonds up in my food processor, then adding those to powdered sugar. Then I started to beat the egg whites. When I started to add the sugar-almond mixture to the egg whites, I realized things were awry. The batter was incredibly thin. All the recipes I read require a pastry bag to pipe the batter onto the cooking sheet. There was no way I was piping this runny stuff:
I stuck a batch in the oven to see what would happen. In the meantime I googled "macaroon technique". That's when I started to read about how difficult these little buggers are. I especially liked Lucas Hollweg's story in the Times online: Man v Macaroon. Sigh...I had done everything wrong. I had altered the recipe, changing the delicate proportions of sugar to almond to egg. I had ground the almonds myself not so carefully - I was too lazy to sift our the big bits and probably didn't grind long enough to get the fine powder required. The result was that the discs were way too big. They rose in the oven (for a brief moment giving me hope), but then sunk after coming out of the oven. The consistency was so chewy that it was almost like toffee, sticking to your teeth.
What was I going to do?!
I decided to add more sugar until the dough got stiffer. I also increased the cooking time, hoping that the rising I saw happen succesfuly would stick if I just left them to solidify in the heat. So with each new batch of these colored discs, I experimented with these two factors. Each batch was different. Finally, I god something that looked pretty good:
Success? Well, no.
I bit into this cookie and it was solid as a meringue rock. Crunch! Nevermond, I decided. They still taste pretty good. I sandwiched them with raspberry jam and they weren't so bad. Turns out, the next day, the macaroon part softened up significantly - I think they absorbed moisture from the jam and turned out not so bad after all! Next time: I am going to try to powder the almond fluor better, follow a recipe strictly, and use old eggs, which I read in a few places make better macaroons.
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