I thought I'd try my hand at baking macaroons ... those dainty little almond flavoured biscuits, that look oh so pretty with their spring inspired pastel colours. Sadly, mine didn't look quite so pretty and they didn't taste as good as I'd hoped either.
I have two different books with macaroon recipes. I've got The Great British Bake Off - How To Bake and Lorraine Pascale's Baking Made Easy ... I opted to follow Lorraine's version.
It started out well enough as I combined icing sugar, ground almonds and egg whites into a thick paste ...
Caster sugar and a splash of water were put onto the heat to dissolve and then brought up to the boil to make a sugar syrup. Whilst that was happening, I whisked up some more egg whites to the soft-medium peak stage ...
The recipe called for the sugar syrup to be poured onto the whisked egg whites and it was here that I think things went slightly astray! As soon as the hot syrup hit the egg whites, it rapidly cooled and made the mixture go "grainy" (I can't think of any other way to describe it!). You can just about see what I mean in the photo below ...
I persevered and added the mixture to the paste I'd prepared earlier, by folding together until combined.
It's at this stage in the recipe that the food colouring is added (if using) and it's at this point that I'll refer you to my recent mini meringue kisses post ... remember I said I didn't think I'd added enough colouring? Well, I made up for it BIG time with this recipe ...
Oh my goodness! What had I done???
Despite the rather lurid colour scheme, I spooned the mixture into my piping bag and went about piping evenly sized(!) circles on to x2 parchment paper lined baking trays. Then I waited 30 minutes to allow a skin to form before popping them into a cool oven to bake for around 12 minutes ...
Once they'd cooled completely, I sandwiched two of the individual biscuits together with some whipped cream and the results didn't look too bad ...
Unfortunately, I think I slightly under baked them as the insides were a bit stodgy and chewy, but it was too late to do anything about it ...
So there you have it my friends, the first negative result from my NEWrecipes52 adventures. But I won't let this experience dampen my spirits. In fact, I think I'm going to try the recipe from my other book as that has a different method of preparation ... but that's for a future post.
1 comment:
Well Sue, these LOOK delicious! Baking is such a precise art that sometimes recipes just don't turn out as we would have liked. I think that 5 out of 6 recipes being successful is awesome though!
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