macarons to start off a new year

Happy 2012! I hope everyone had a great new year to wrap up the holiday season. So to start off this new year, I made French macarons. As I said before, I love tea, so I just had to flavor these little bites with matcha green tea and earl grey tea. Macarons have found a soft spot in high end bakeries in the past few years. And home bakers, like me, daring for a challenge, have researched extensively and experimented with recipes and techniques to try to achieve the perfect non-hollow, slightly moist, and footed sandwich cookie. Despite David Lebovitz's logic paralleling baking your own macarons to making your own hot dogs, us novices still venture to create these little almond cookies.



I made macarons before with A. and Audgbodge, following Tartelette's extensive array of recipes. But this time, I stumbled upon Not So Humble Pie's elaborate post and explanation of these treats that baffle a lot of us. I loved her mathematical and logical approach to deducing how macarons work. The graph that she used to compare different recipes made complete sense to me and begged me to question why I didn't think of that earlier. Since baking ultimately comes down to ratios of ingredients that result in the right chemical reaction, her comparison was brilliant.

I always found macarons to very overly sweet, so when her recipe called for a bit more almonds and egg whites to sugar, I was on board. I used one recipe to yield two batches, one flavored with two teaspoons of matcha green tea powder and the other with the  ground leaves of one teabag of earl grey. Most recipes tell you to pulverize almonds with the powdered sugar in a food processor all at once, but I found that it becomes hard to tell if the almonds are fully ground. I found it easier to blend the almonds with a few spoons of powdered sugar until mostly powdered, then sifted, and the remaining chunks of almonds blended again with another few spoons of powdered sugar. It was just easier to ensure that the almonds were ground in smaller batches, but make sure you add the powdered sugar as it keeps the almonds from turning into almond butter.  

I filled both of them with a bittersweet chocolate ganache from Epicurious, recipe halved and filled into a plastic bag to chill and then pipe. This time around, I read up about maturing macarons in the refrigerator for a few days and decided to try it out. They were in fact quite delicious, with the shell a bit more moist and flavorful. As usual, I gave some away to save myself. Surprisingly A. enjoyed the earl grey more and even her boyfriend, who normally doesn't like macarons liked mine. Most likely because these weren't as sweet, inherently from the almond/egg white ratio to sugar and additionally from the slightly bitter filling.