Mothers Day Macaroons

M is for mothers day and Macaroons 

You are absolutely going to need an electric whisker for this recipe and a lot of patience, if you have these then its actually relatively simple 

Macaroons recipe 

Step 1

Make a meringue

 4 large egg whites 

 80g sugar 

 Powdered food colour

Put the egg whites into the bowl and whisk until the white become foamy and has tripled in size, then add the sugar and keep whisking. This is the key when your making macaroons, you need to whisk and keep whisking, it will form soft white peaks, but even when it does keep whisking and leave whisking for around 15minutes. Finally add your colour and keep whisking until its all an even colour. 

Step 2

You can start this while your whisking 

 160g icing sugar 

 160g powdered almond

Now you prep these ingredients, the trick with this half of the  prep is for the almond to be as fine as possible, so its a bit of a ball ache but you need to make the ground almond as fine as possible and the best way to do this is to keep passing it through a sieve, and you need to do it a couple of times for the best results and for the final time do it with the icing sugar as well, this will evenly combine the two ingredients. If your anything like me when I read a recipe sometimes I think oh that doesn’t seem that necessary and ill skip it because its boring, that you don’t want to do with macaroons, its a process and a very important one. 

Step 3 

Combine the almondy sugar paste with the meringue. You will need to do this bit by hand. 

Add half the meringue to the almondy paste and with a metal spoon fold it in, I do it 20 folds. Her you need to be careful again too little folds means bad macaroons and too many folds means flat biscuits not macaroons, so count 

Step 4 

Piping bag! 

Put your mixture into a piping bag with a round nossel and pipe out your round macaroons, try and get them the same size and also remember they will flatten out a little bit more than when you first do it 

Step 5 

patience, leave them in a cool dry place to dry out before cooking, i normally leave them for around 2 hours

Step 5 

cook in an oven preheated to 150 for aorund 40 minutes, I say around because its slightly depends on your oven so keep an eye on them and when they look like macaroons with that wonderful step on the bottom, they are probably done 

Step 6 

make a filling, these ones are filled with white chocolate ganache 

200g white chocolate 

200ml cream 

melt the white chocolate and leave too cool to a temperature thats not too hot to touch, this will take around 20 minutes, then add the cream, leave in the fridge for another hour then fill your macaroons and stick them together like little burgers. 

so you see its a series of simple steps but you need to do it over a long period of time, so if you have a day at home planned you can make them inbetween cleaning the house or gardening or something. but dont rush them or they wont work