Chateau Gateau

Roopa

Macarons have been a little bit of a challenge for me since moving to Vancouver. My apartment gets up to 66% humidity in summer, and it rains constantly in winter, so getting the shells to dry properly is a bit of a challenge. Either way, I was pretty intrigued to see what Chef Marco’s macaron recipe entailed. His method utilizes an Italian meringue as the base, which was definitely not a method I had tried before!

MACARONS

INGREDIENTS

• 200 g almond powder
• 200 g icing sugar
• 75 g egg whites
• 200 g sugar
• 50 g water
• 75 g egg whites
• 2 g powder food colouring

DIRECTIONS

1. Put the almond powder and icing sugar in a food processor and pulse until it forms a very fine powder.
2. Mix the egg white with the powder in a large bowl and set aside.
3. Whip egg whites in a stand mixer at medium speed.
4. Mix together water and sugar in a saucepan and heat them to 114 C.
5. Pour the hot sugar mixture into the stand mixer, being careful not to pour it onto the whisk.
6. Add the powder food colouring into the meringue until you reach the desired colour.
7. Whip the meringue until a soft to medium peak has been formed.
8. Mix 1/3 of meringue into almond base with a wooden spoon.
9. Add another 1/3 of the meringue into the almond base and fold in.
10. Add the last of the meringue into the almond base, and fold/deflate the batter until you have the consistency of slow moving lava.
11. Preheat oven to 300 F.
12. Pipe the macarons onto a silicone sheet and let them sit for 20-30 minutes, until a thin skin has been formed.
13. Bake for ~10 minutes.

Notes:

• If they crack in the oven, they are probably not dry enough
• Don’t make a smaller recipe than this
• If you underwhip the meringue, the batter will be too runny.
• If you add the sugar syrup in before the egg whites have reached max volume, they will never get as stiff as you want.

It was really interesting to see how critical drying time. One batch went in about 7 minutes too early, and everything cracked. The next pan dried longer and they turned out perfectly. With the exact same batter and exact same everything, a few extra minutes of drying was the difference between the picture below and the picture above.

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RASPBERRY GANACHE FILLING

INGREDIENTS

• 140 mL raspberry puree
• 20 g sugar
• 200 g white chocolate
• 100 g milk chocolate

DIRECTIONS

1. Heat up the puree and sugar until it comes to a boil
2. Once boiling, add the puree to the chocolate and mix until smooth
3. Set aside until it is cool enough to pipe