Macaron tips and troubleshooting

I often get asked about problems people encounter when making macarons and I thought I'd share a few here.

1. Macarons crack in the oven
• Don't be tempted to bake your macarons until a firm skin has formed on the surface of the entire macaron. If there is any part of the macaron which is still wet on the surface, cracks will form when you bake them
2. No feet form when I bake them
• Your initial temperature is too low - start baking at a higher heat and drop down once your feet form after a few minutes if you are concerned about the macarons colouring
3. Macarons have a bumpy appearance
• I always grind my own almonds from scratch - store bought almond meal is generally too coarse and thus will result in a bumpy surface on the macaron
• Grinding almonds alone in a food processor will result in a big lump of oily almond paste. To avoid this, grind equal quantities of almonds and icing sugar together - this prevents the paste from forming, and saves you sifting the icing sugar! This mixture is called a tant-pour-tant
4. Always follow the recipe you are using - there are two main methods (some say three, but we won't complicate things here):
• French Method: this involves raw egg whites being beaten to a stiff meringue with a small amount of castor sugar. A tant-pour-tant isn't used in this method as there is generally double the amount of icing sugar to almond meal used in this method. This method is faster and less of a hassle than the Italian method below, but is not suitable for making large batches and is pore prone to failure. Most of the amateur cook books and cooking magazines use this method (eg. Women's Weekly, Donna Hay etc.)
• Italian Method: this involves making an Italian meringue using a hot sugar syrup and half of the egg whites, and mixing in the other half of the egg whites with the tant-pour-tant. This method is favored by the likes of Pierre Herme and Adriano Zumbo and is great for making large batches (up to 100 macarons). The failure rate for this method is low.

Hopefully this helps with your next macaron attempt - feel free to email me with any questions I haven't addressed above!

Caramel centered chocolate macarons...

To start these, make your caramel first:

Melt 100g castor sugar until golden

Add 66g cream (carefully)

Then add 100g butter

Combine until glossy, then put in fridge until ready to use

When ready to pipe, whisk with electric beaters until pale and creamy (see images below)

Caramel before whipping

Caramel after whipping

 Next, make a chocolate ganache (100g chocolate, 100g cream), and allow to cool in the fridge.

For the chocolate macaron shells, use the generic macaron recipe but replace 30g of icing sugar with 30g of cocoa powder.

Once cooled, pipe the whipped caramel in the centre of each macaron.

Then pipe around the caramel with the chocolate ganache (be careful not to use too much or it will spill over the edges)

And the finished product:

Donate Your Lunch Money

As part of World Food Day, Foodbank Victoria have this great initiative where you can donate your lunch money here to help the 400,000 Victorians that at some stage in the year miss a meal because of hardship or crisis.

You know those macarons or that slice of cake you were thinking of devouring at lunchtime? why not use the money you were going to spend on lunch and donate it to a worthy cause?

Please make a little sacrifice and support this worthy charity by clicking on the image below.