I love how versatile macarons can be once you nail the technique of making them. They’re really just almonds, sugar, egg whites and air, so they can take on almost any flavour you can think of. This month, I paired bitter, grassy hops from our home brew vine with sweet and tangy grapefruit zest to make one complex cookie. The result is sweet and buttery but also has those sharp citrus, grassy and aromatic top notes of an amazing IPA. With one foot in summer and one foot in fall, it’s the perfect flavour for September.
Ingredients
for the macaron shells
- ¾ cup ground almonds (as finely ground as you can find)
- 1 cup icing sugar
- zest of 1 whole grapefruit
- 2 large egg whites, at room temperature
- 3 tbsp + 1 tsp sugar
- creamy peach gel food colouring
for the filling
- 7 tbsp unsalted butter
- 7 tbsp milk
- 10g hops, broken up with fingers
- 2 egg yolks
- ¼ cup sugar
- sky blue + Kelly green gel food colouring
Method
for the macaron shells
- Prepare your parchment sheets by drawing 1″ circles, ½” apart across the entire sheet (or using silicon baking mats with the circles already printed on them) and placing them on a large flat surface suitable for drying your batter, like a dining table. You will need 2-3 half sheet pan size pieces.
- Sift ground almond and icing sugar together, twice. Add grapefruit zest. Set aside.
- In a large stainless steel mixing bowl, beat egg whites with an electric beater on medium-high speed until you have a foam with no liquid remaining.
- Slowly add the sugar while continuing to beat the egg whites. Beat on medium-high speed until the egg whites reach stiff peaks. You’ve made meringue!
- Add gel food colouring and beat in.
- Fold your almond, icing sugar and zest mixture into the meringue in two parts.
- Here’s the part that takes practice: it’s time for the macaronnage! With a spatula, spread the batter, with some force, against the side of the bowl. Then scoop it up by running the spatula along the side of the bowl again and try to flip it all over and sort-of lightly smack it back into the bottom of the bowl. Gather the batter up again and repeat 12-15 times. It takes some time to figure out the best way to do this, don’t be afraid to play around with it. When doing the macaronnage correctly, repeating more than 20 times can result in oily, blotchy macarons, but I’ve found that doing it incorrectly doesn’t count towards this limit. If you are doing it right, the batter will take on a noticeable and somewhat sudden change in consistency, this means you are about half-way to that limit. When finished, the batter should be thickened and drip slowly and smoothly from the spatula. You will have to pipe it onto your baking sheets/mats and it won’t work if the batter is too runny. This is the technique that defines macarons, this is what makes mastery of them impressive.
- For perfectly round macarons, use a large, 0.4″ plain tip with a pastry bag, or do it the lazy way and cut a corner off a zip top bag for mostly round macarons. Twist (or don’t yet cut) the bag at the tip and place it, tip side down, in a tall glass. Fill with your batter and twist, close or clip the other end to help keep the messy batter moving in the right direction. Pipe the batter into the centre of the circles on your sheets/mats and stop before reaching the edges as the batter will spread out a bit.
- Once finished piping, carefully pick the sheets/mats up and drop them back on to the table from a height of a couple of inches. The theory is that this helps the cookies keep their round shape and form the little bubbles around the bottom (the pied) when you put them in the oven.
- Leave the cookies on the table, uncovered, to dry – this could take 20-30 minutes on a dry day or a couple of hours on a humid day. You will know the macarons are dry when they look smooth, less glossy and are no longer sticky to the touch.
- Preheat your oven to 350°F. Place an oven rack in the centre of your oven. Place a sheet of macarons on two stacked sheet pans (this will stop the bottoms from getting too hot, resulting in cracked macarons) and bake for 15-18 minutes. Rotate the pan half way through baking. It can be hard to tell when the macaron are done. I pull them out when the kitchen smells sweet and the cookies look crisp, have just started to brown, and don’t look blotchy in the middle.
- As soon as the parchment sheet/baking mat is cool enough to handle, take it out of the pan with all the cookies on top and place it on a cooling rack. The macarons will be too sticky to remove from the sheet/mat now; once cooled, they should peel off easily. I usually wait a few minutes for the pans to cool a bit and for the oven to come back to a steady temperature before moving the next sheet to the pans and baking the next round.
for the buttercream
- Warm the butter in a double boiler or in the microwave until it is soft but not melted. Beat until creamy.
- In a small saucepan, bring milk to a boil. Remove from heat and add the hops. Cover and steep for 10 minutes.
- Meanwhile, place the egg yolks in a small bowl and whisk lightly. Add the sugar and beat lightly until they are a pale yellow.
- Slowly pour the steeped milk mixture into the egg mixture, beating continuously.
- Strain this mixture back into the saucepan, pushing the hops with a spatula to squeeze all the liquid out. Discard the hops.
- Simmer over low heat, whisking frequently, until the mixture has thickened to a loose custard.
- Now pour the mixture into a clean bowl and beat lightly until it has thickened and cooled to about room temperature.
- Add the butter in three parts and beat until smooth with each addition. (If the buttercream bubbles and splits, keep beating until it becomes thick again.)
Once everything has cooled, place your buttercream in a piping (or zip-top) bag and pipe onto half of your shells. Then place another similarly sized shell on top and gently press them together. You’ve made macarons!
All photos by me.
