Chocolate and salted caramel macarons

Finally got a chance to make this recipe from the 2010 holiday edition of the LCBO magazine.

Making the cookies are a little tricky. A lot of them turned out cracked or malformed. I got about 60% yield on the 24 cookies I made.

Some lessons learned:
  • After piping the mixture out to form the cookies, do not "top up" with extra cookie mixture at the end. Otherwise you get this nipple effect (picture below, left).
  • Flattening the  macarons out with the back of a spoon dipped in warm water is a bad idea. While it is effective in flattening the peaks, it causes ugly bubbles like this (picture below, right) to form on the surface.
Malformed cookies: (left) "nipple" effect. (right) bubbling on the surface

I had a lot of leftover caramel in the end. If you don't have a super sweet tooth like me, you can get away with making just half the caramel recipe.

The final product:

Macaron on a plate with caramel oozing out

Tin of macarons to share with friends

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