Macaroons or ‘macarons’ if you want to be all French about it are possibly the most awesome foodstuff on the planet.
I know there are many people who would argue with that statement, but I would argue that those people should not be reading this blog.
Now if you live in a small and mostly un-French place like Tasmania there are limited opportunities to purchase macaroons, and you may be forced to make your own. That is basically why I started to make macaroons.
Macaroons are fiddly and time consuming to make but they are worth it for the enjoyment factor. They also last really well (about 10 days).
The ones in these photos are chocolate (above) and pistachio (right).
I was a little more careful in shaping the chocolate ones - you can see the pistachio ones are misshapen and a bit weird looking. This was because I was just doling them out on to the oven tray with a teaspoon. You get a much better result if you pipe the mixture out into circles using a wide nozzle.
The chocolate ones are made by adding cocoa to the basic meringue mix of egg whites, sugar and almond meal. The chocolate buttercream I made by just adding some melted dark chocolate to some creamed butter (unsalted) and icing sugar. In other words it is a butter icing with lots of chocolate in it!
The pistachio macaroons are a bit more tricky. For a start they are a lot more expensive to make because pistachios cost heaps more than almonds (this may be a seasonal thing I guess). Then you have to buy them whole and grind them from scratch. Whatever you do, don't buy salted ones. And don't try to grind them by hand with a mortar and pestle, your arms will drop off. You need to whizz them in a food processor with some icing sugar so they don't get too oily. And then you need to whizz them again. And again. Just saying.
For the filling in the pistachio macaroons, I discovered that traditional recipes often put a couple of egg yolks in the buttercream along with butter, sugar and some ground pistachios. I was a bit worried about this but it worked really well, I can recommend using the egg yolks as it seems to stabilise the mixture and add an extra smoothness and taste dimension.
I'll post more pics as I make some more.
Just FYI, I have actually found three places in Tassie that sell macaroons. In Launceston, Tant Pour Tant in Charles St has them but only about once a week and you mostly have to order them specially. In Hobart you can get them at Sweet Envy in Elizabeth St North Hobart, and there is a microbusiness called Ruby’s Macarons (do a search on Facebook, they have a page) who supplies some delis. Companion Bakery at Oatlands also has them sometimes.
Quick comparison between suppliers:
Tant Pour Tant makes very traditional medium sized macaroons, mostly vanilla ones, with a firm buttercream filling. They are similar to Laurent Patisserie’s in Melbourne.
Sweet Envy’s are smaller and have buttercream filling plus a mystery additional filling of syrup or something, and a huge range of flavours, blackberry, raspberry, lemon, orange, lemon myrtle etc. I love their coffee one especially.
Ruby’s are medium sized, traditional buttercream and they do an awesome salted caramel one that is filled with a soft caramel, outstanding!
Companion is more a rustic style and they are very large, only vanilla, and the filling is a stiff almond paste which I didn’t like very much (sorry Companion, you do awesome sourdough bread and semolina biscuits though).
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