Meredith's Macaron Extravaganza!
The first thing you need if you’re going to undertake French macarons is lots of enthusiasm.
I find that nothing makes me more enthusiastic about baking than a nice Mrs. Claus apron and a Le Creuset full of delicious simmering caramel sauce.
The second thing you need when undertaking French macarons is a friend who happens to love them.
It also helps if it’s that particular friend’s birthday and your gift happened to be a book about macarons, ingredients and supplies to make them and a free afternoon in which to do so.
The book, being new and ridiculously adorable, didn’t like to stay open to the correct page. Hence, the third necessity:
A bookmark made out of a stick of butter! (It’s being brought to room temperature for the buttercream filling, of course.) I can’t think of a more conveniently shaped bookmark than a stick of butter — can you?
We decided to make two kinds of macarons: pink with salted caramel buttercream in the middle and pink salt sprinkled on top and pistachio with rose water buttercream. I find it necessary to confess that the colors were chosen, not in an attempt to turn Christmas pastel, but because those were the only food colorings I had left at the time.
I appear to have left out the most important part of this whole process. We had a whole book devoted to macarons. I’m not going to supply a recipe and then throw you to the wolves. I’ve only recently jumped on the macaron bandwagon and there are loads of blogs and websites with more detailed and precise instructions than I am able to provide — after all, I’m nowhere near an expert. In fact, I made a total of three batches of macarons this weekend, and the first one turned out better than the other two.
The second batch was marvelously green and pistachio-laden, but appeared greasy and proved difficult to remove from the pan. They were tasty, especially with the rose water buttercream, but I think I preferred them in their unbaked state, when they still had the potential for excellence.
This photo brings me to the fourth thing needed for macarons. Look carefully at that photo. See what I’m squeezing the batter out of? It’s a Ziploc bag. Attached to that Ziploc bag is a too-small pastry tip screwed into a corner of the bag and reinforced with a rubber band. It worked, but I went through too many plastic bags to feel good about myself when I took the garbage out. I need a pastry bag.
Our sojourn into macaron making ended abruptly, when we realized we had very little time to get ready for Springfield Creamery’s Christmas party at which we were providing macarons. So we packed everything up as quickly as possible and never even got a chance to photograph them as we ran out the door. In all the rush we still managed to make time for this:
Thus ends the tale of Meredith’s birthday macarons.
