My Macaron Madness

A few years ago, my husband & I went to Lindt Cafe to have afternoon tea with a friend.  We ordered a chocolate degustation plate.  In the plate, there were some chocolate macarons.  That was the time when I first knew about this "classy" french delicacy.  When I had my first bite on the dark chocolate macaron, I was thrilled.  The taste, the texture, everything about it was superb!  Since then, I became addicted to macarons.

A friend of mine is a qualifed chef.  Back then she was taking a professional course about baking.  I used to seek her advice whenever I came across any questions regarding baking & cooking.  When I told her I would like to try making macarons, she said it would be a very difficult task as she once saw the demonstration by her teacher.  Anyhow, what she said didn't scare me due to my madness about macarons.

I did heaps of research on the internet & watched some YouTube videos over & over again just for the sake of understanding the required batter consistency.  Oh man, that was hard job.  I tried using french meringue, italian meringue & swiss meringue to make the macaron shells.  It took me almost 10 attempts before I could make them successfully.  From my experience the french meringue method is the hardest though it is less complicated than the other two methods.  I just gave up on using the french method as I failed on it 3 to 4 times >_<

Since I've have successfully made macarons, I've tried making different flavours like chocolate, strawberry, raspberry, green tea, black sesame & pandan.  The ones that you see from the above photo are pandan flavor.  I did them in my friend's place back in July 2010 as she asked me to teach her how to make macarons.  The shells had beautiful "feet" :-)

Next time when I make macarons, I must take some pictures & publish them in this blog.  It's such a shame that I didn't take pictures on most of the previous ones that I made.  I'll share some details on the process too.  Hope it will interest some people to give it a go.  After all, making macarons is not that hard once you've mastered the required batter consistency.