This past Christmas, my friend Erika sent me "I love macarons" by Hisako Ogita. I would always talk about macarons in lab with her, so in her cute letter to me she wrote, "I saw this book and thought about you." I've attempted macarons before, but this time decided to try Hisako Ogita's recipe with the macaronage method. The "macaronage" method involves folding and lifting the batter several times to achieve the correct consistency of the batter to produce perfectly textured macarons.
The recipe for macarons is quite simple. The base formula consists of almond meal
(I bought mine at Central Market in the bulk foods aisle), powdered sugar, granulated sugar, salt, egg whites, flavoring (I used matcha powder from Matcha Source). Here's a picture of the mixture of dry ingredients.
I guess it helps to follow the directions and draw uniform circles on the bottom side of the parchment paper so that your macarons will have a uniform size and shape.
Here's the baked macarons (see their cute little feet!). I followed the instructions, but tweaked a few things. I did not follow the author's advice to use organic powdered sugar. I used the typical (and cheaper) powdered sugar because in reality, both sugars contain some kind of starch (corn or tapioca) so I really think you'd end up with the same finished product. Maybe I'll conduct an experiment on the effects of organic versus regular powdered sugar for macaron-making and run a sensory test to determine the differences...
I also reduced the bake time a little because I thought they looked dry and done.
I kept rolling my eyes as Mike jokingly critiqued the shape and colors of macarons and said that they were "unacceptable" and then popped them in his mouth. I think he liked them because I left a container at home of the "unacceptable" macarons (there were about 10 pieces) and when I got back from work, they were all gone.
My filled macaron. Mike thought that a dark chocolate ganache would overpower the matcha macarons, so I ended up spreading whipped cream between two cookies.
If you want to read more about macarons, check out this blog. It's really interesting to read about all her adventures in macaron-making.
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5 comments:
yummy! I have this book in Japanese, haven't gotten the courage to try the recipe yet :) Looks great!
wow, they are seriously picture perfect! I knew you would put the book to good use but I'm still amazed. And if they passed the Mike test, they must have been as delicious as they look!
Beautiful! I am so happy to see these.
Kat-The recipe was really simple. You should definitely try it. I started becoming interested in macarons because of all your posts.
Erika-Thanks so much for the book. I have more almond meal so I'll be posting my other experiments online.
Thanks Chou!
thanks Genki, will muster up some courage and try :)
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