#macaron fail

[blacksunskitchen]

Macaron failure. 

Ok, I’ve made a few macarons in my time and most of the time I used the time tested method of letting them dry out at room temperature for 45-75 minutes to form the skin of the macaron. However, I’ll try other methods to see if they work. 

This time I followed the method in Les Petit Macarons where you dry the macarons in the oven at 200F for 15 minutes before baking at 350F for 9 minutes.  It did not work.  At all. 

As you can see in the pictures above, the quick drying in the oven caused the skin to be too thick resulting in the wide spreading foot.  It also exposed the macaron to too high a heat for too long and created the huge air bubble in the shell (my most hated macaron fail). 

A macaron’s skin needs to be formed just enough that you can glide your finger across it and feel it without any batter sticking to you.  I’ll stick to the air dry method in the future to both have a properly proportioned foot and to not overheat the shells.  At least they taste ok, once you get past the shattering shell.

[hitormiss-eats]

tried my hand a macarons a few months back. they were a huge flop.

i used this food network recipe. these were my second try at macarons (i used this tasty recipe the first time; overmixed and the batter became much too liquidy. mixed in some all-purpose flour and they became almond cookies). 

took maybe 5 hours.

i bought almond meal bc i couldn’t find finely-ground almond flour, and ground it into almond flour myself in a food processor (with added powdered sugar so the almond meal wouldn’t release too many oils). 

made a meringue out of egg whites, folded almond meal and powdered sugar in, and i think i overmixed the batter at that point. it became much too liquidy, and they spread too much when i piped them out onto parchment paper (hence the fused lopsided ones).

they rose a fair amount after baking (grew feet), but they were all hollow inside.

a miss. a huge, comically tragic, miss. i’m probably never trying macarons again. this took too much out of me.

[jupitergreenwood-blog]

Macaron's second attempt an epic fail

I'm really bleakly disapointed, my first attempt was so close but I think that I changed too many things - different brand of sugar, pre-ground almonds (last time I ground them myself), 1 of the eggs was slightly chilled, gel food coloring instead of water based and probably too much of it (the color was awesome) but the change that I think killed them was that I did 70 folds with the almond/sugar mix, last time I did 60. They came out of the oven flat chewy disks and had all run into each other. I woke up in the middle of the night and the urge of getting up and trying again was virtually uncontrollable, but I didn't, tonight I will try again. In hind sight I realised that I had the oven on way too high, which was probably the reason why they failed so badly.