In all the European tour of the last few days, these are the most intimidating things to bake. Typical French. Despite having now done quite a lot of baking in my time, I was genuinely terrified of making these, but I set myself the challenge, and despite a mammouth 6 hour shopping trip earlier in the day, I did it, although I suspect it was a bit mad.
Online advice on these is numerous and contradictory, I stuck pretty much to Willow Bird Baking’s advice, with a couple of extra things I picked up on the way. You have to start early, I aged my egg whites for 48 hours out of the fridge, and this recipe does require quite a lot of equipment that I had hanging around my house, but other, more normal people, may not.
225 g, 8 oz. icing sugar
190 g, 6.7 oz. ground almonds
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
5 room temperature egg whites
Combine icing sugar and almonds. Beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks, then add the granulated sugar a bit at a time, then whisk into stiff peaks. Here’s a salutory lesson, sometimes mod cons are highly necessary – I didn’t have the whisk attachments for my hand mixer, so I had to whisk it by hand. It took an hour. I have a new found respect for my forebears. Sift the sugar/almond mixture in to the egg whites, slowly and gently. Try to keep under 50 strokes when mixing in – although I massively failed to do that and they still turned out ok.
Spoon the mixture into a piping bag. Pipe small circles onto a baking sheet covered with parchment, then leave for half an hour (helps to form a skin). Hit the bottom of the baking sheet before you put them in to release air bubbles. Heat the oven to 90 degrees C, or ‘slow’ on a gas oven. Bake the macarons for five minutes, take out and put the oven up to 190/gas 5. Bake for 7 minutes, then remove. Cool on a rack before filling.
A good tip is to wet the back of the baking parchment with a pastry brush if you’re having trouble getting them off, they come off like a dream.
I filled mine with chocolate buttercream, which is 175g icing sugar, 75g butter and a bit of milk and coco powder.
And now collapse.