An Adventure in Baking

On Sunday, my friend, Christina, and I began our adventure with making French macarons. Christina has been wanting to attempt to make these for a while and we've both spent WAY too much time on the Internet searching for recipes to try and tips for making the perfect macarons. We had 4 recipes to try and thank goodness we did, because we ended up throwing two batches away! 

First we measured out all of the ingredients using a kitchen scale...most recipes give ingredients in grams/ounces.

After everything was measured, we beat the egg whites until foamy (most recipes recommended using eggs that were 1-3 days old and at room temperature)

While that was being done, Christina sifted the almond flour and the powdered sugar.

Time to add the caster sugar!

After mixing on high for several minutes, stiff peaks began to form. The way to test it was to flip the bowl upside down...if nothing falls out, it's ready!

  

After the egg/sugar mixture was ready, we added in the sugar/almond flour mixture and stirred it in. It was very critical to not stir more than 50 times!

Once the batter was ready, we put it into a piping bag.

Then it was time for Christina to pipe the batter onto the macaron mat

It's important to let the batter sit out and dry for about 25-30 minutes. This gives it time to settle.

Once they were in the oven, we were both very curious to see if they grew "feet," and Christina kept a close eye on them!

SUCCESS!  This was our very first attempt and we were thrilled!

Time to make the filling - for these ones we did a salted caramel buttercream filling.

We added red food coloring to the filling to make it a little more festive.

We had many more attempts - here's one with a chocolate ganache filling.

These ones just have plain vanilla buttercream with yellow food coloring.

Final result - all nicely packaged in the cute containers that Christina bought!