With a flurry of excitement, I recently convinced myself that not only was I going to finally tackle a batch of macarons, but that it was also going to be easy.  I’ve been reading a lot of macaron recipes these days…that’s probably why I talked myself into it.

Apparently by now everyone else has gotten the hang of these little cookies; after all, I am about a year behind the macaron trend.  By now I’d forgotten all the pains and sorrows I read about six months ago, about how these little buggers are temperamental and how there’s about a million ways you can screw them up.  So last night I foolishly gathered my ingredients and threw a batch of them together, fool-heartily assuming that they would be awesome and tasty, and that I would take them to work the next day, win friends, gain the respect of my enemies, and in general win at life.  For about an hour, things were good.

Then my oven alarm went off.

Peeking into my oven, I frowned seeing not only that they did not have feet, but that they were still a little wet around the bottom.  “Never fear,” I thought to myself, “They obviously just need to sit in the oven a little longer.”

Then began a series of two-to-three minute intervals in which I baked, checked, poked, frowned (with increasing ferocity) and slammed my oven door shut to cook the macs a little longer.  After twenty or thirty minutes of nonstop grumbles, I finally gave up and took them out.  I then commenced being a grouch (teh BF can vouch for this).

The good news is that there actually were a few salvageable cookies, even if they weren’t perfectly styled macarons.  Not wanting my delicious ganache to go to waste (I bought Scharffen Berger for the occasion ;_;) I completed a few of them.  It made me feel better.  They tasted pretty good, actually, if a little over-done.  Also I’m afraid the ganache was a little overpowering (72% chocolate, I believe), though that may have been because I only had an open-face macaron instead of a whole one (you know, for that one nagging cookie without a mate).

Exactly what macaron-baking issues did I have?  Let me list them:

1. No feet
2. Peaks that would not lay flat
3. Partially hollow/did not cook all the way through, despite having browned tops

I did some reading through Not So Humble Pie’s Macaron Troubleshooting post and it looks like I either under-mixed my mac batter or let it rest too long before baking.  Additionally, I think the placing of my pans was a little weird.  You see, I only have one cookie sheet, which isn’t actually a cookie sheet at all…maybe it’s more of a jelly roll pan?  Basically it has sides (as opposed to being completely flat), and is also a bit small; my Silpat doesn’t fit entirely on it.  I also only have one pan, so the rest of my macarons went onto…*cough*…my pizza stone. >.>

 

Unfortunately there’s not enough room in my oven for both the pizza stone and the pan on the same rack, so I ended up putting one on the upper rack, the other on the middle rack…basically both of my pans were in weird positions, and I suspect did not get evenly cooked.  Blast!

Not to worry, though – I’ll try whipping up another batch this week (probably half this size so I don’t waste as many ingredients in my experiments) and I’ll get better.
Oh, one last point of interest – I actually used liquid egg whites for the batter (it’s something I’m trying out…I hate wasting egg yolks -_-).  While I fully admit that this may have contributed to the problem, I don’t think it held the majority of the fault; the whites whipped up just fine, even if they may have taken a little longer than manually separated ones (it felt that way to me).