Today I feel grand. Today I’m esctatic. And a little bit proud of myself. After weeks of macaron madness I finally managed to produce a batch that does not suck. But let’s rewind a couple of weeks…
As mentioned before I have noticed macarons for the first time online. They instantly caught my eye. All those prrrreetty colours. I was fascinated, even though it took me a long while to finally have a good macaron. the stuff they sell here at the supermarket are just all wrong. Too cakey and chewy. Just odd. And the macarons at the finer bakeries in Germany are obscenely expensive. But then Alex and I went to France (remember how lovely it was?) and there I finally had proper artisan macarons. It was love at first bite and I knew I NEED to learn to make them.
My very first try was basically me being cocky. I’m not used to sticking to recipes. When I cook and bake a new recipe I tend to improvise and most of the time I wing it. So I was just throwing some ingredients together, not weighing properly not paying attention to the dough and so on. What came out of the oven didn’t even deserve the name “macaron”.
The second time Alex and I tried to tackle those little beasts. Again… not having the proper ingredients they turned out a lumpy mess and ended up in the bin pretty quickly. The day later Alex still wanted to try. I was already sick of it and not in the mood for another failure, but Alex was soldiering on. Even though the dough was way too thin and melted into several big macarons during the resting, they certainly behaved like macarons in the oven. They formed a skin and they had feet! We thought we had cracked it and planned on making a fresh batch the follwing weekend. I was so certain we would make a pretty little tray full of delicious macarons. Boy, was I wrong…
We tried two batches yesterday. Stuck to the recipe and all and still they turned out lumpy grainy with no rise at all. I was crushed. Three hours slaving away in the kitchen and nothing to show. That’s it, I thought… I just can’t do it. I wanted to take a break from those damn macarons.
But that’s the thing when I really wanna do something. I get obsessed and I need to keep trying even though I get grumpier and grumpier with every failure. But I didn’t fail this time. I tried a new recipe and changed a few things that I assumed we did wrong last time (it’s all just speculation unfortunately…) and violá…. macarons! I was overjoyed when the little feet developed and they looked roughly like those macarons I had seen on pictures. After 1-2 days of maturing I will know for sure how well they turned out, but I think they’ll be fine.
I’m not ready to share a recipe yet, because there might be a good chance that the next 2-10 batches will be rubbish again, but someday I will.
There seem to be so many things going on in the process of baking macarons. And a lot of things still seem illogical to me. Look at the picture above. Both macarons where from the same dough, baked with the same oven temperature and had nearly the same resting time. The only difference was, that the one on the left had a cheap light baking try and the one the right a dark, heavy-duty baking tray. I have no clue why they came out so differently *Shrugs* I don’t really care though today. Because today, I made macarons!
