Macarons!

When we visited Paris 2 years ago, I discovered a new dessert...macarons.  Soft shell on the outside, yummy filling on the inside.  Oh so good.  Ever since then I have been on the lookout for macarons.  Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for my budget and waistline), the Swiss macarons have nothing on the French ones.  I have found some good ones here, but for the most part they cannot compete with French ones, especially the Parisian ones.

My Parisian Macarons

Tom has been very patient and indulgent in my macaron obsession.  We buy macarons everywhere we see them.  He even brought me some straight from Paris when he had a day trip there.  However, since they are hard to find and quite pricey (the good ones can be close to $2 apiece), I cannot indulge my taste buds as often as I would like.  To solve this problem, Tom bought me two macaron cookbooks for my birthday complete with the promise to make them with me.  It has been a great present.  Not only is it fun to do together, but the results are quite delicious, even if they aren't as pretty as the store-bought ones.  Here's a documentation of our first attempt.

After ageing our eggwhites for 5 days, sifting our almond flour to remove the big chunks and carefully folding everything together, we piped our batter into the macaron pan Tom included with the cookbooks.  (In the end we found that the macaron pan is great for making universal shapes, but TERRIBLE at making good looking macaron shells.  They were eatable but ugly!)

Piping the batter onto a cookie sheet.  Is Tom doing it like the picture?

Stage 2 - The Filling

We didn't have time the first night to do the vanilla buttercream filling for our vanilla shells, so here's our 2nd night on the job.

Pairing up the random shapes that we had and sandwiching them with the cream.

Our food pictures leave much to be desired.

Hurray, they're done!

After letting them sit for 24 hours in the fridge (supposedly to allow the cream to infuse into the shells) and then letting them sit at room temperature for 30 minutes, Laura got to eat a "ma-ka-kon" as she calls them.

Enjoying macaron success!  Laura is as hooked as her mama :)

All in all, making these little cookies wasn't quite as complicated or challenging as the cookbooks made them out to be.  They were a little bit involved, but they turned out fine.  The certainly weren't beautiful, but they sure did taste good!  Thanks for a fun b-day present, Tom!

P.S. We just finished our 2nd batch last night.  Again, they turned out tasty, but hideous.  We tired to color ours this time and instead of a vibrant bluegreen like we were hoping, they turned out a pastel aquamarine.  Not an appealing color to eat.   If you get past the color though, they're quite good!  Picture to follow.