This was a fun challenge for me, even if it was last minute. Started and finished this one only one day before the posting deadline... Hey, I'm just following the precedence I set a few months ago!
Anyways, the recipe looked fairly straight forward to me. I gathered my ingredients on the way home from work yesterday and put the egg whites out before dinner to get to room temperature. I then spent the whole evening eating and playing dominos with my family. So I didn't really get started until 9:30 or 10:00pm. The perfect time to start baking on a weeknight! It all turned out quite nicely, even if I did have to improvise a bit.
The egg whites whipped up beautifully. The recipe has you beat egg whites to a soft peak and then add a bit of sugar and continue beating to a stiff peak. At this point, you fold in a mixture of almond flour and icing sugar. When it's all together, you pipe it onto parchment paper or a non stick liner. Well, this was my biggest problem. I don't have any parchment paper. So, ignoring all the voices in my head that said it was a bad idea, I did one pan of macarons directly on the teflon non-stick coating, and the other pan lined with foil and given a quick spray of Pam.
Well, after baking I discovered that while the foil/Pam method worked a bit better, both pans were still intact and useable. Excellent! In the future I would use the parchment paper method- I think that would make the process a lot easier... Macarons are supposed to have little feet to them, and while some of mine did, it seems like there is a direct correlation between drying time and foot size. I could have dried mine longer.
French Macarons can be filled with a number of things. The suggestions we were given were buttercream, ganache or jam. As I didn't really want to insert chocolate into the chocolate-free recipe and didn't feel that the buttercream would be right, I went with a jam filling. Luckily, we just happen to have dozens upon dozens of beautiful jars of homemade peach jam. I can't take credit for the jam- it was made by Mom, from fresh peaches that my parents picked up while driving through the Okanogan in September.
The combination of the sweet almondy macaron and the slightly tart peach jam was absolutely wonderful. I could eat dozens of these by myself. In fact, I just had one for breakfast!
Anyways, two dozen of them came to work with me today, and everyone raved about them. One of the guys said that if he ever gets married, it will be to one of these. Instead of calling them French Macarons, he calls them Wife. This lovely recipe will definitely make it into my stack of favourites!
Happy Cookies!
- Carolyn
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