Macarons

Macarons (mah-kah-ROH) are a great little French treat.  For all of you trying to be both dairy and gluten-free, this is perfect for you.  They are made of almond flour, eggs and powdered sugar. The ganache, however, does have heavy cream in it. Tartelette is a well-renowned French pastry chef who lives and works here in the US.  Click here to check out a blog post about learning how to make Macarons with Tartelette.

I set out to make these little guys about a month ago and the technique was too tricky for this amateur!  However, I finally found this recipe which claims to be fool proof and I tried again.

I made French chocolate macarons with chocolate ganache filling for the first batch (doubled the recipe). Upon achieving success, I just had to make another flavor (and use up some of the leftover chocolate ganache) so I made Martha Stewart's recipe  here  for French vanilla macarons (used food coloring to make them pink) and then added high quality raspberry preserves to the ganache to get a raspberry-chocolate ganache filling.  I sampled the final result and they were très bien!

Overall assessment: Very simple to make once you get the technique down. You truly do have to use the extra large plain pastry tip to get the right shape.  Also, you don't need to let them sit out for a while after piping them onto parchment paper.  Simply wrap the cookie sheets onto the countertop a few times and you will get the same effect.  Oh yeah, you do need to use egg whites at room temperature.