First adventures in macaroon making

It may not be immediately obvious given the content of many of my posts here and the name of this blog, but I do actually bake more than just cupcakes! At the moment I am focusing on expanding and improving my skills rather than widening my repertoire, with a particular focus on bread and pastry. However since I can’t be bothered making pies and am running slightly low on yeast, bread and pastry have been pushed aside somewhat in favour of more interesting experiments. This is why a couple of weeks ago I decided to try my hand at macaroons.

I love macaroons, they are one of my favourite things to have with a cup of tea, sadly they are also very expensive which is why I don’t get to eat them nearly as often as I like. That and my favourite shop to buy them from is in London and I don’t go there very often...
Moving on, they are also have been a challenge on The Great British Bake Off several times and given my intention to apply for the show I figured it was about time I tried them out. And er this was the result

As you can see, not a complete success, apart from being rather misshaped (I didn't take my time piping them) they look OK  There is a crisp outer shell, the problem came when I tried to remove them from the sheet. It turns out they weren't fully cooked, the inside of the shell was still sticky and wet. However despite this I did taste one and they did taste right, so all in all I don’t think this was too bad for my first attempt.

Now when something I bake goes wrong I always try and figure out why, I believe that is the best way to improve. So here is what I think went wrong here.

First of all I think the proportions of my ingredients were off. You see last Christmas I was given a macaroon making set which included a bag of almond meal (blend of icing sugar and ground almonds which is the base for a macaroon), which according to the instructions in the kit was a 1:1 ratio of almond to sugar. However the kit recipe was made using the Italian meringue method and since I don’t like working with sugar much I didn't follow those instructions. I actually followed the instructions in a macaroon recipe book I own, which makes them the French way and in the book the almond meal ratio was 2:1 (icing sugar to almond). I believe using combining the two recipes with their different proportions was my first mistake.

Secondly I don’t think I left them alone long enough, you see after piping out the mixture it is essential that macaroons are left alone to dry out. According to my book this can take anything from 10 minutes up to an hour and is the key to making macaroons, this drying process is what gives macaroons their distinct crinkled “foot” and crisp outer shell. As I was up against time constraints I don’t believe I left mine long enough to dry out and in addition to this I don’t think I baked them long enough, this is partly why I think the inside was still wet and sticky.

Finally I think the other problem was the weather, I know that sounds like I’m being very British and just talking about the weather because I can but I do have a point. You see meringues are very sensitive to climate, and can really only be baked on dry days, otherwise they absorb any moisture in the air and tend to go rather sticky. Since macaroons are essentially almond meringues I am beginning to suspect that they might also be affected in this way, especially as it was a foggy day I was making them on.

So all in all I think are combination of things contributed to my downfall, however now I have identified them hopefully these issues can be resolved for future attempts. Will I be attempting macaroons again? Yes but probably not for quite a while!