I have spent a lot of time reading food blogs over the last year and I have come across many great blogs and great people, both professional chefs and at home cooks, who are preparing some tasty food and offering up some excellent recipes and advice. One thing that seems to be lacking though are accounts of failures. There are a few bloggers out there admitting to failures but for the most part, most bloggers tend not to write on their missteps. I find this too bad as often there is more to be learned in someone’s failure than in their success. With that said, I offer up this post on a recent failure of great proportions in the hopes that it might offer some help to those that have had the same trouble.

In a recent post I discussed my desire to start sharpening my baking skills again after letting them languish for a number of years. Well this week I got a bug up my ass to bake french macaroons. I love french macaroons, their crispy exterior and soft, moist interior and subtle flavor of almonds have always been a weakness for me though I haven’t had them in years as it isn’t easy to locate them in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. I remember baking these in culinary school and from what I had remembered they took a certain amount of finesse but weren’t overly difficult to create. I grabbed one of my “go-to” cookbooks on french cooking (which shall remain nameless) and prepared to make the first batch of macaroons that I had baked in 15+ years. As you can see by the photograph at the top of the page, it was a disaster. I can’t lay all the blame on the cookbook, though I will lay most of it with it. My first mistake was following the first recipe I read. Even when I trust a cookbook I usually do a good bit of research before attempting a food for the first time, but with craziness at work, I blew that part off. It sure would have saved a good amount of time if I had bothered to have done my research. Allow me to list my macaroon transgressions, in order of importance, so that you won’t make the same mistakes. 1. The recipe never called for making a meringue. It only had me whip the egg whites to “just barely stiff peak” then add my almond sugar mixture into that. All the other recipes I know of use meringue as the base for the macaroon and whipped egg whites alone are not a meringue. 2. The recipe called for a short baking time at a slightly higher temperature. I have since seen two schools of thought on this, in my subsequent research. One bakes at a slightly elevated heat for a brief period (8-10 minutes), while the other bakes at a lower temperature for a much longer period (anywhere from 15-30 minutes depending on the recipe). With the knowledge I have now, I think I will be baking lower and longer. 3. I am pretty sure I slightly over whipped my egg whites. While they were not where close to becoming dry or separating, I think, according to various recipes, I shouldn’t have taken them as far as I did. 4. Finally, since I was grinding almonds and not using almond flour the recipe says to sift the almond sugar mixture. I didn’t, thinking that I would like the more rustic texture of a few bits of almond. I was wrong. The almonds gave the macaroons texture but not in a pleasant sort of way.

Armed with this knowledge of my errors, and a whole lot of research, I am planning on tackling macaroons again. Not sure how soon I will get to them, but be on the lookout for follow up posts as I am determined to get these little buggers right!

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