I’ve heard so much about how dif­fi­cult it is to make mac­arons, as a bak­ing enthu­si­ast, I’ve set out to tackle this bak­ing mis­sion. It started out, of course, unsuc­cess­ful, I wanted to stran­gle the per­son who invented this evil dessert (just kid­ding). At my fifth attempt, they finally look like good mac­arons. If they turned out right, they should have a slightly crispy shell, a ten­der and slightly chewy cen­ter. I can’t say I am an expert at mak­ing these of course, I am sure I will encounter more problems.

I’ve always liked the flavour com­bi­na­tion of Matcha (Japan­ese high qual­ity green tea) and choco­late, it is the per­fect match of east and west flavours in my opinion.

So this recipe was adapted from My Food Geek’s “Almost Fool­proof Mac­arons” recipe. It uses the Ital­ian meringue method, it requires cook­ing a sugar syrup and com­bin­ing it with whipped egg whites, cre­at­ing a meringue. One of the advan­tages of the Ital­ian meringue is that it is more sta­ble than the French method (whip­ping together sugar and egg whites) because the egg whites are cooked by the hot syrup.

Trou­bleshoot­ing from my experience:

These are some of the prob­lems I encoun­tered when
bak­ing macarons.

• Cracked Tops: oven tem­per­a­ture was too high from the bot­tom, so I had to used 2 stacked bak­ing sheets for these.
• Pro­trud­ing Feet/Tops Slid­ing Off: I think I under-mixed this batch, they are a bit high in height. The slid­ing tops might be a result of my bak­ing sheets hav­ing an uneven surface.

• Sticky Bot­toms: I have way over-mixed this batch, it was too liquid-y when I piped it. They also turned out VERY thin and impos­si­ble to get off of the bak­ing sheets with­out destroy­ing them.
• Uneven Feet: I have no idea what caused this, I think I have over-mixed a lit­tle because they are quite thin as well. I also think I did a bad job of mak­ing the sugar syrup because there were lit­tle chunks of sugar in the meringue.

Notes that I have for suc­cess­ful mac­aron baking:

• Invest in an oven ther­mome­ter. My oven is prob­a­bly more than 20 years old so the tem­per­a­ture is always off so hav­ing a ther­mome­ter is help­ful in determing the right temperature.
• Know your oven VERY well. Okay, every oven is a bit dif­fer­ent so you will need to adjust tem­per­a­tures, racks, bak­ing times etc. accord­ing to your oven at home.
• Don’t over-mix or under-mix. As you can see from my pho­tos above, get­ting the meringue in the right con­sis­tency is one of the impor­tant fac­tors. Too much will make the bat­ter runny and too lit­tle might cause weird feet. I can’t really tell you in words what is “right” so you will need to exper­i­ment a bit.
• Get good bak­ing sheets. Non-stick sur­face bak­ing sheets are actu­ally very bad in con­duct­ing heat and may warp eas­ily so I got myself alu­minum bak­ing sheets which are much bet­ter in con­duct­ing heat and the sur­face is nice and flat. I also bought sil­pats, it is not nec­es­sary but it saved me a lot of parch­ment paper.
• Give your meringue a lot of LOVE. Mac­arons are quite del­i­cate so if you treat it with care, they will turn out nicer (It’s TRUE!).

Myths:

• Pow­dered Sugar vs. Icing Sugar — you don’t HAVE to use pow­dered sugar (100% sugar), icing sugar (con­tains up to 5% corn starch) will work fine.
• Aged Egg Whites vs. Fresh Egg Whites — I have tried bak­ing with aged and fresh — they both work, just make sure they are at room tem­per­a­ture and isn’t con­t­a­m­i­nated with any yolk, oil or water.

[UPDATE: Mar 6/2012 Food Geek has given some extra help­ful tips located in the com­ment sec­tion below!]

Finally, happy bak­ing!