Sweet Sweet Macaroons

Day 5 - Advanced Cooking Group - Blog by Aiden C

Day 5 of the Art Of Cooking J-Term kicked off for the advanced cooking group with a far more cautious-than-normal attitude. Today we were making Macaroons, a dish made of a delicate cookie sandwich filled with a flavored ganache. Macaroons, unlike other dishes, have a property that makes them quite different to make. Not only does the dish require very specific mixing amounts to make sure the egg whites come out correctly, but we also wouldn’t be able to know if we had done everything correctly until a step near then end, when it was far too late to go back. With this in mind along with detailed instructions from our recipe books and from Chef Jessica, we got started.

Isa Sifting Powdered Sugar

Our first step was to choose what flavors we wanted to go with, and our group chose to make chocolate-raspberry macaroons. Macaroons have two major parts, the meringue cookies and the ganache filling to go between them. Despite how you would think, I learned that when making macaroons you don't actually flavor the meringue cookies themselves, but the ganache. Because of this, your flavor will be apparent in the final dish while still allowing the macaroon to keep it's signature airy taste. We started by quickly mixing together the ingredients for our ganache so we could place it in the fridge, allowing it to cool in time for us to use it on the cookies. Once that was out of the way, we moved on to starting the macaroon batter.

Lulu's Finished Meringue Batter

In order to make the macaroon batter we had to follow very specific instructions on things like heat and stir time, because macaroons are famously known for being very specific in the processes needed to make them. In the end our macaroon batter ended up being a little thick in terms of consistency at the start but turned out being really close to perfect in the end, with the batter not solid but able to hold a shape when poured, which is the ideal consistency to allow macaroon cookies to have their fluffy, dome-like shape and texture.

Kilali Drawing Circles

Once we finished mixing the batter we had to draw circles for our macaroons on the parchment paper we used to line our baking tins because each macaroon cookie had to be perfectly sized in order to pair with another once they were baked and we put them together.

India Custom-piping Heart Macaroons

We then used piping bags (left) to pipe out the macaroon dough into the circle shapes we drew. Some of us tried making other shapes, and while they were pretty well made it became obvious later on why an exact, circular shape is a good, safe option. We had to pipe the batter onto the baking trays in a very certain way, starting from the center and letting the dough flow out without moving the piping bag. I had trouble learning how to do this, but we then had to pull the bag up and swirl it in a very specific way so that the macaroon would turn out nice and flat while still holding it's shape and not flowing out and expanding.


Lulu and Nuria's Finished Macaroons

Once our macaroons were all piped we baked them with the help of Chef Jessica and watched them carefully to make sure they didn't burn. According to the Chef, the macaroons should come out of the oven with a very slightly browner ring around the edge and a completely non-sticky center. Once our macaroons were cooked, we used the chocolate ganache we made to create a small, thin ring of chocolate on each cookie pair, and then filled the center of that ring with raspberry preserves, giving it a rich chocolate flavor alongside the light raspberry flavor from the preserves. We then closed up the macaroons and they were ready to be served!

And Now, Each Team's Finished Macaroons: