French macarons

No — not macaroons, those coconut cookies we all know. These are macarons, a meringue-like cookie made sandwich-style with a yummy filling in between the halves. A friend and I took a class at a local place last night, and I think everyone there had a wonderful time making various kinds of these almond-flavored delights. They’re tricky, though.  Here, my little group was beating the hot sugar syrup into the egg whites; a tiny bit of overcooking the syrup, and the batch is ruined!

My group made chocolate-flavored macarons, while the other two groups made the more usual plain ones, simply adding food coloring to go with the filling chosen. The chocolate batter was very stiff before the meringue mixture went in!

Once everything was made into a batter of the right consistency, it was piped onto baking sheets …

… and put into the oven to bake. Anxious eyes watched the baking, waiting for the “legs” to appear on the bottom of each macaron.

When finished, the macarons had to cool before being removed from the baking sheets and sandwiched. Our chocolate macarons had lovely legs, but we didn’t pound the cookie sheets enough after piping, so we had some air bubbles. 🙁

Still, they taste good! This shows a selection of the different ones made by the groups last night. The green ones are filled with chocolate mint, and the pink ones with strawberry. The big pink one with the raspberries has a white chocolate mousse filling. They all looked even better before they were a little mangled on the way home. 😉

The class was really fun, and I hope I’ll get to take another sometime soon. 🙂