Baking Bouchon - Recipe 31: Vanilla Macaron (Macaron Madness - Part 1)

This is the first post in a three part series on macarons.  I made three different kinds of macarons for the bridal shower of a dear friend of mine.  (Spoiler alert - not all three flavors made it to the shower). 

Vanilla Macarons - recipe from the Bouchon Bakery cookbook (which we are discussing today)

RaspberryMacarons - recipe from the blog Brave Tart

Chocolate Macarons -  recipe from the Macaron class I took at Sur La Table

I was amazed how different each of the recipes were and am excited to share my experiences with you.   

Making macarons is no joke.  I'm pretty sure I made macarons for at least 12 hours straight.  I can't possibly express to you how exhausted I am.  Let's start with the bad news first.  These little jokers will bust and crack faster than you can say boo.

But let's start at the beginning....

Macarons are a french pastry cookie made with meringue (egg whites & sugar) and nut flour (in this case, almond flour).  Macarons are characterized by the smooth top and the "foot" that develops  from moisture escaping from underneath the cookie while it bakes. 

The first step in this recipe is to grind the almond flour to make sure it is very fine and no large chunks remain.  The flour then gets sifted with the powdered sugar and mixed with half of the eggs and the vanilla bean. 

The other half of the eggs get whipped with cooked sugar to form a meringue which gets folded into the flour mixture.

Neither the raspberry or the chocolate macaron recipes I used separated the eggs into two additions or used cooked sugar.  They both whip granulated sugar in with the entire egg mixture and fold that into the flour.

I have no idea why this recipe does it this way and I don't believe it affected the success of the macarons.  I had limited success with all the recipes, so I can't blame it on this particular technique.

The consistency of macaron batter is supposed to be like lava.  I think it's so funny that every recipe I read described it exactly the same way because I'm not sure how many people know what lava looks like.  I've never seen lava in person.  That stuff is dangerous and I prefer to stay away from it.

Once you get the batter lavalike, it gets piped into perfect little circles on parchment paper.  All of the recipes recommended that you use a template to ensure that the circles uniform in size.  I took that advice and printed templates on the computer and put those under the parchment paper on the sheet pans.

Baking the macarons is entirely nerve wracking!  They are temperamental little buggers and the slightest thing can cause them to crack wide open on top (do you remember the first picture in this post?).  If you bake them at too high a temperature... crack!  If it's too humid... crack!

The first two trays of macarons were beautiful!!!  I can't tell you how excited I was, they looked just perfect.

All subsequent trays... CRACK!  I'm not sure what happened.  My only theory is that the oven temperature got hotter as it was left on.  Luckily, I made a lot more batter than I actually needed so there were plenty of vanilla macarons for the bridal shower.

I decided to fill the vanilla macarons with lemon curd, but I didn't use the recipe from the Bouchon Bakery cookbook.  I used this recipe from Food and Wine which was easy and turned out perfectly thick and tart.

The combination of tart lemon and light, sweet macaron was wonderful!  I was really happy with how they turned out.

Tomorrow it's all about raspberries... a pretty, pink and tasty treat!  Will the cracking continue?  We shall see...

Julie