I left Edinburgh on May 15th and have been travelling to a few different places in Europe ever since. So far I have been to Lisbon (check out the photos here), Porto (further north in Portugal), Madrid, Barcelona, and Berlin (photos to come soon). I am halfway through with my trip before I head back to Toronto on June 15th.
I have family here in Berlin and have finally had the chance to spend a little extra time in front of the computer--you can always feel people breathing down your neck in the hostels, waiting for you to get off. Before leaving Edinburgh, I actually made two different recipes, but with work, packing and saying my goodbyes, I never got the chance to post them on the blog. This macaron recipe is the first of the two I made. About a week before, I cracked and bought a new cook book (my weakness). I'm travelling and don't need to lug anything else around with me but I was about to start letter 'M' for the blog and Irresistible Macaroons by Jose Marechal was indeed so irresistible with all of its pretty pictures! I was also really inspired to try making macarons (which is what the French call them...I think they just call them macaroons in the UK but I know that at home those are something else..) after my friend Hilda visited me in back in February and brought me a box of them from Paris.
These definitely are not the easiest treats to make. In order to end up with the perfect result, everything needs to be meassured (and weighed) exactly. There are also certain tools that should be used such as a scale, piping bag, food processor, thermometer, a good oven (I was using a tiny electric one..) and specific kinds of food colouring. The main reason why I picked this recipe for double chocolate macarons was that it was the only one in the book that did not require the use of gel food colouring. I did not know where to find this and it wasn't really a purchase I wanted to make if I was only intending on using it once. I didn´t have a scale either so I ended up using a conversion chart to help me make the most precise measurements possible.
I think for a lot of the recipes I have made since I have been overseas, I often did not have ALL of the recommended equipment and tools but I usually came up with some sort of solution. The basic macaron recipe is probably not the best to try and be inventive with. I do think that the result I ended up with was still so delicious although less delicate and perhaps slightly more "rustic". The cookies were a bit flat and there was no consistency to their shape. Some of them were cracked but more from the later batches were smoother and I think that this was because they had a little longer to dry before being baked.
Although the macarons were very time consuming, I am definitely going to try making them again (perhaps a different flavour) once I get home to a better equipped kitchen!
Ingredients: 200 g (7 oz) icing sugar
30 g (1 oz) cocoa powder
80 ml (2 3/4 fl oz) water
200 g (7 oz) caster sugar
2 x 80 g (2 3/4 oz) egg whites
Chocolate Ganache:
220 g (7 3/4 oz) dark chocolate (70% minimum cocoa solids), broken into pieces
200 ml (7 fl oz) single cream
20 g (3/4 oz) icing sugar
50 g (1 3/4 oz) butter, cubed
Decoration:
125 g (4 1/2 oz) dark chocolate
1 tsp of neutral oil such as groundnut or sunflower
1) The day before, make the chocolate ganache. Place the chocolate in a mixing bowl. Bring the cream and the sugar to the boil, pour over the chocolate and mix until the chocolate has melted and blended with the cream. Add the butter to the mixture and stir until melted. Leave to cool at room temperature then set aside in the fridge.
2) Mix the icing sugar, cocoa powder, and ground almonds together thoroughly until you have a fine, even powder. Sieve and set aside.
3) In a saucepan, bring the water and the caster sugar to the boil. Use a thermometer to ensure that the temperature of the syrup does not exceed 110 C (230 F). This is very important.
4) Whisk half the egg whites until they form soft peaks--not too stiff.
5) Decrease the speed of the whisk, then still whisking, pour the sugar syrup over the egg whites in a thin line. Continue whisking until the mixture has almost cooled, this will take a while and will be easier in a food processor.
6) Mix the other half of the egg whites (unbeaten) with the sugar and almond base to get a thick paste. Add a little of the meringue to the almond paste with a flexible spatula and stir in with regular motions from the bottom towards the top and from the edges towards the centre of the bowl. Add the rest of the meringue in one go and mix in gently. This is a crucial step. The consistency of the macaroon mix should be smooth, even and runny.
7) Fill a piping bag (I used a plastic bag with a hole in one of its corners) with macaroon mix and pipe small even discs of mix on to a try covered with greaseproof paper (and stuck down with four small dabs of macaroon mix in each corner) . Lightly tap the bottom of the tray on the work surface and leave to dry slowly at room temperature for an hour. Preheat the oven to 145 C (125), gas mark 1 1/2.
8) Cook the macaroons for 13 minutes. Immediately on taking them out of the oven, slide the greaseproof paper and shells on to a moistened worktop. This will help the shells detach from the greaseproof paper more easily.
9) With a piping bag (or plastic bag with a hole), fill half the shells with the chocolate ganache, then sandwich together with the remaining shells. Space them out on a baking tray that has been covered with greaseproof paper.
10) Melt the dark chocolate with the oil in a bowl placed over a saucepan of boiling water, or melt very carefully in the microwave.
11) Cut a piece of greaseproof paper into a right angled 20 x 30 cm (8 x 12 inch) triangle. Take the right angle between thumb and index finger, roll the paper around the two fingers to make a tight cone, then fold the other two corners inside the cone. Fill halfway with the melted chocolate then cut the tip off. Squeeze thin stripes of chocolate back and forth across the macaroons. Put in the fridge for a few minutes to set the chocolate.
TROUBLE SHOOTING
(Since macarons are natoriously complicated to make, I have copied and pasted the trouble shooting section from the book)
- The shells are flat and have lost their pretty colour
The macaroon mix was over mixed so the beaten egg whites fell and became to liquid - The shells aren't smooth
The amond and sugar base wasn't well mixed or sieved thoroughly enough - The shells aren't round
They weren't piped confidently enough. You must be very precise; the piping bag should be held perpendibular to the baking tray and you should move it away with a quick, sharp movement - The shells are cracked
There are threee possible explanations:
1. The oven temperature was too high
2. The pasted wasn't mixed well enough
3. The shells were cooked too early so did not have enough time to dry
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