Making Macarons Part 2

Hello again friends! Today we will be revisiting a topic that I wrote about a bit ago: the marvelous and mighty macaron. I freaking love macarons and basically only ever go to Whole Foods to buy the macarons they have in the little freezer case right when you walk in. I LOVE THEM. Last time that my fiance and I tried to make macarons, things didn't go too badly but the filling did leave much to be desired. This time we decided to try a different recipe, from the Nerdy Nummies cookbook made by one of my favorite YouTubers, Rosanna Pansino. We followed her recipe almost exactly, but I will let you know where we made small changes.

The first steps were related to getting the batter ready. Macaron batter typically involves dry ingredients mixed with a meringue. Rosanna called for almond meal, but we could only find almond flour at the grocery store so we went with that. We mixed the batter as she described; the only small additions that we made were to add a small amount of gel food coloring, as well as some raspberry extract to the batter.

Once the batter was mixed, we piped the cookies into onto parchment paper-lined baking sheets. The cookies were supposed to be about an inc, but I I have not concept of time or space so I would say ours ended up being closer to 1 1/2 inches in diameter or radius or circumference or whatever word means from one end of a circle to another. After a quick Google search, it appears that diameter was the word I was going for. We then set the cookies out to rest for about 45 minutes. We got crafty and moved my puzzle table into the bedroom with the AC blasting to ensure that the cookies didn't melt. For those of you that do not know, leaving the cookies out allows them to form a skin on top which means that when you put them in the oven, they bake "up" rather than "out." You will get a taller cookie, rather than one than has spread out.

Once the cookies had rested, we baked them according to the recipe and then got started on our filling. This frosting was cream cheese based as opposed to the butter based frosting we tried last time. This frosting was SO much better than last time and did not immediately start melting. If making this type of cookie, I would highly recommend going with the cream cheese frosting. We changed up the frosting slightly by added mashed fresh raspberries, which required us to add more powdered sugar than the recipe called for to balance out the extra moisture from the raspberries.

The final steps were sorting the cookies once they had baked and cooled to make nice top and bottom pairs and assembling everything. To assemble, all we had to do was pipe a small bit of frosting on the bottom cookie and then gently press the top cookie on top, ensuring that we did not push hard enough to break either cookie.

Here are some nice action shots provided by my mother. These were DELICIOUS and the cream cheese frosting worked out so much better than our previous buttercream frosting attempt. I would highly recommend this recipe! Macarons are not that hard if you don't mind giving over a few hours to the project.

What have you guys been baking in quarantine, especially as hotter weather is setting in?

 - Rebecca