Macarons: Baking

This afternoon I made maracons, the subject of many urban kitchen legends. As I wrote in my earlier post, I used the Italian meringue method, which entails heating the sugar and water to 120C before slowly stirring it into the beaten egg-whites. This part wasn't so easy. I soon discovered that it can turn into a disaster very quickly if you let the syrup go even a little above 120C. I found my heartbreaking when all of the sudden my precious 24h-old eggwhites were squandered as the sugar turned brown and hardened into a big lump. No, one cannot make macarons from baseball-like lump of sugar hard enough to break a window. So I started that process from scratch.

In the end, I managed to get everything mixed and form some sorts of circles on my baking sheet (above). It was the longest 10 minutes of my life waiting for the first batch to be done. They didn't come out as beautiful as I had hoped, but pretty enough, and as I discovered later after patting some lemon curd between two halves, they were very chewy and lovely tasting. Success in some department, at least! The second batch, however, was a complete disaster, even though they were from the same dough. The only thing might be a slight fluctuation in temperature (to 190C) by my moody gas oven, or that the baking tray was different, made of a more heavy metal as opposed to the aluminium tray used for the first batch. Who knows. The other general problem was the food colouring. For some reason the macarons did not come out as yellow as they should have, but were more cream coloured (though in the photos below they are fine, thanks to some editing...). Did they get too toasted on top? Too little colouring? Again, these are the mysteries of macaron baking that few know the answers to.

Next time I'll give the French method a whirl. This wasn't so bad, but was a little stressful. I am happy with the result, though I have some way to go before I can boast my macaron skills.