Flirty Food: Adventures in Macarons

They're cute, they're colorful, they're all over the Internet. No, not kittens, although that's a good guess. I'm talking, of course, about macarons - those little French meringue cookies that have suddenly exploded into popularity. And for good reason. Just take a look at these beauties!

I first tried these amazing little creations at Selfridge's in London, which turned out to be the best possible place to try them, since Selfridge's hosts the business of Pierre Herme, a famous pastry chef, and offers such exotic flavors as dark chocolate blackcurrant and pistachio apricot praline. (The graphic above is from his website.) When Lauren and I decided to make macarons our first official food project, we never aspired to anything that fancy, but ended up with some surprising combinations anyway.

The recipe we used was courtesy of food writer Tom Harte from the Southeast Missourian, and was supposedly a simpler method of making macarons than the traditional way, which sounded good to us. (Recipe can be found at the link.)

Unfortunately, being new to the process of photojournalism, we neglected to take pictures of the actual mixing process of the macarons. Suffice it to say that the meringue took absolutely forever to set up, a food processor is the perfect tool for grinding almonds quickly, and adding just a tiny bit of food coloring isn't probably the best idea, because if your macarons start out light pink and then you bake them, they end up looking like this:

You know you need to get more sun when your cookies have a better tan than you do.

Anyway, the macarons turned out more or less the right shape; a little practice with the homemade pastry bag should sort out that problem. But the texture was just right; crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside. A few of the smaller ones did burn a little bit, but that was okay.

De-panning the macarons was a cinch because of the parchment paper. (Unlike Lauren, I'd never worked with parchment paper before this recipe; it's now my new best friend.)

These were our potential fillings - three kinds of jam (strawberry, raspberry and apricot), Nutella, the last remains of a jar of lemon curd, and my favorite goat cheese (which we now inevitably refer to as "the happy goat cheese"). We ended up ruling the strawberry out right away - far too sweet when paired with the cookies - and the apricot got an "Eh". There wasn't nearly enough lemon curd to go on more than a couple of cookies, which was a genuine tragedy. But our favorite flavors turned out to be raspberry Nutella and - surprisingly - goat cheese. The tart cheese was the perfect balance to the mildly sweet macarons and the texture was perfect for spreading.