Baking Bouchon - Recipe 88 & 89: Raspberry & Lemon Macarons

This is kind of a weird post because I made these macarons at totally different times.

The raspberry version I made in December with a friend of mine.  They turned out really well, but I neglected to take any pictures while making them.  I barely remembered to take pictures of the finished macarons.  I think I was too excited about having company in the kitchen that I was just enjoying the experience which was a nice change up.

The cookies themselves are almost identical to the vanilla macarons in this cookbook except that you leave out the vanilla bean seeds and add pink food coloring.  So honestly, the macarons aren't raspberry at all - they're just blank canvases for raspberry filling.  The filling is French Buttercream with Raspberry Jam mixed in.  My guest and I both agreed that the filling didn't have enough raspberry flavor in it so we added more jam.  We also decided it wasn't pink enough so we added pink food coloring.

These were pretty successful with about half of the cooking baking up beautifully without exploding.  In my limited macaron experience, that's pretty darn good.

I had far less success a few months later when I made the lemon macarons.  The macaron cookie here is the same as the raspberry in that it has no lemon in it - just yellow food coloring.

I don't know what happened - I did what I've always done and cooked up some sugar, whipped it into egg whites to make a meringue and folded that into almond flour and powdered sugar.

Piped them out and baked them.

And then they cracked.  All of them.

I take that back - all but six of them.  This was ridiculous and irritating and a total waste of time because there was no way I was letting anyone see these things outside of these four walls.

I had already made the filling so I figured I might as well sandwich all the hideous cookies and photograph only the three that weren't completely exploded.

The filling was pretty awesome - a mix of buttercream frosting and lemon curd.  The lemon curd was amazing and really made me regret my decision to use store bought lemon curd in the lemon meringue tarts instead of making the recipe in the Bouchon cookbook.  It was super tart and oh so creamy because of the butter that gets blended into it.  Mixing it with the buttercream gave it an even richer texture.  It was really freakin' delicious.

Since I was too embarrassed to share all but three of these (which I didn't do because who shows up somewhere with three cookies?) I have to eat them all myself.  I'll let CA and my mom help me but no one else will be subject to these ugly yet delicious treats.

Enjoy!
Julie