Macaroons

I returned from Paris last week and had very little time to enjoy the California sunshine of home before heading to the wintery climes of Wisconsin to spend quality time with Ed and our friend Adam, who's been kind enough to give me free reign of his well-equipped kitchen while I'm in town.

Now that I've been in the Midwest long enough to satisfy the craving for beer-battered deep-fried cheese curds that I never knew I had, I've decided to take advantage of my downtime here in Oshkosh to practice some of the recipes I learned in Paris. It's so much more rewarding to cook for the ones you love than to simply cook for yourself, and I'm so happy to share some goodies with Ed and Adam-- and to use them as test subjects!

I eased in with some simple steaks with Bearnaise sauce, and in true French fashion, the sauce took ten times longer to make than all the other dishes combined. Today I made a simple chicken tarragon, and plan to bring that into a regular household rotation.

One of my two big challenges this week is to make macaroons for the very first time. We had a pastry demonstration in macaroons at LCB, but we never had the good luck to make the airy hamburger-shaped tea biscuits in the practical class. The chef warned us that they were difficult to make at home because macaroons require very precise temperatures and humidity levels to rise and bake correctly. In my typical fashion, I asked myself, "How hard can it be?" (Cue tragic music.)

I messed up my first sheet of raspberry-rose cookies by trying too hard to abide by the chef's instructions to bake the cookies for the first minute at 400 degrees on the lowest rack, turn the oven off for one minute, turn it back on to 350 degrees and move the cookie sheet to the middle rack. The almond-meringue drops cracked and collapsed, looking more like scrambles eggs than mini burger buns. For my second sheet, I simply placed the cookies on the middle rack at 350 degrees and opened the door for a few seconds near the beginning to let the humidity escape. Et voila-- simplicity won, and I had a dozen nearly perfect-looking macaroons.


The chocolate macaroons didn't rise quite as much, and the dough was harder to work with. I suspect that adding cocoa powder to the dry ingredients (crushed almonds and powdered sugar) changes the properties of the dough more than the chef let on, whereas the rosewater I hazarded to add to the first batch didn't change a whole lot.

Once the cookies were cooled, I paired them and topped one half with either raspberry jam or a simple homemade chocolate ganache, then topped off the sandwich with another cookie. It's not Pierre Herme, but I'm satisfied with my first foray into macaroons. And I won't lose any sleep over the question of whether anyone around here will eat them.