Alana
As mentioned in my Matcha Pudding post, Theresa and I had a macaron date a little while ago. Ever since we first attempted our macaron gateaux, we’ve both wanted to keep baking macarons. I think it’s going to feel really good to perfect the technique, especially since macarons are so trendy. Theresa still works occasionally at a local Edmonton chocolate shop, Jacek, so we decided to use a dulcey ganache to fill our macarons rather than a buttercream frosting.
We wanted to do two bright colours for each macaron, so we picked electric blue and lemon yellow Americolor gels. We coloured and piped half of our batter at a time because the Duchess Bake Book noted that it is important to pipe your batter immediately after completing the macaronage. I was a little bit curious to why, and did a quick Google to figure it out. The macaronage continues to mix the wet and dry ingredients, but it also deflates the meringue. “Macaronage” roughly means “making macaron batter”, which makes sense because until you are finished the macaronage you essentially have an almond meringue.
I figure it’s important to do this right away because as the macaron batter sits, the surface dries. This is good when the macarons have been piped, because the shell it creates allows the meringue to rise while keeping the piped shape and create “feet”. So naturally you don’t want your batter to dry before your macarons have been piped.
The piping is the part I think I find the trickiest because the macaron batter is quite runny. Quite a few of our macaron shells ended up not-round, but I figure they’ll get better with practice. Theresa and I also didn’t put ours close enough together on the parchment paper, so we had to squeeze a few in, so definitely use a template with more reasonable spacing than we did!
The dulcey ganache was delicious of course. I don’t often lick bowls or spatulas, but I have to admit that I did and loved every second of it. To make our ganache, we simply used dulcey callets from Jacek in the place of regular chocolate. We had to wait a while for the ganache to firm up enough to be piped, probably longer than we should have waited because it was quite challenging to squeeze out of a pastry bag. I’ll forgive it though, because it was so amazing.
We used the macaron shell and ganache recipes from the Duchess Bake Book.
Chateau Gateau 