DB:French Macaroons

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

Yes, it's Daring Bakers time again and this month challange is French Macarons. I have first met macaroon at Food show in NY. It was falling in love in first bite. Then I start researching about this marvelous one bite sweets. Thanks to Tartelette , I learned to many tips from her long article called Demystifying Macarons. I am sure that many daring bakers decided to use her recipe instead of the original one.

By the way where do you think my "one bite sweet" blog name came from? Yes, you nailed it. It's from the macaroons. I know, i don't have any macaroon recipe in my blog yet. Actually I have in my Turkish blog uzakkose.com . I have a lot of good stuff in Turkish that I don't have time to translate and put it in here yet. But I am working on it. Here is my little french kisses. I chose to make almond macarons with a banana buttercream and dragon fruit macaron with strawberry buttercream.

Thanks for another fun challenge.

Here’s the basic recipe:

Ingredients

• 2 ¼ cups (225 g, 8 oz.) Confectioners’ (Icing) sugar
  
• 2 cups (190 g, 6.7 oz.) Almond flour
  
• 2 tablespoons (25 g , .88 oz.) Granulated sugar
  
• 5 Egg whites (3 day old)
  

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 200°F (93°C). Combine the confectioners’ sugar and almond flour in a medium bowl. If grinding your own nuts, combine nuts and a cup of confectioners’ sugar in the bowl of a food processor and grind until nuts are very fine and powdery.
2. Beat the egg whites in the clean dry bowl of a stand mixer until they hold soft peaks. Slowly add the granulated sugar and beat until the mixture holds stiff peaks.
3. Sift a third of the almond flour mixture into the meringue and fold gently to combine. If you are planning on adding zest or other flavorings to the batter, now is the time. Sift in the remaining almond flour in two batches. Be gentle! Don’t overfold, but fully incorporate your ingredients.
4. Spoon the mixture into a pastry bag fitted with a plain half-inch tip (Ateco #806). You can also use a Ziploc bag with a corner cut off. It’s easiest to fill your bag if you stand it up in a tall glass and fold the top down before spooning in the batter.
5. Pipe one-inch-sized (2.5 cm) mounds of batter onto baking sheets lined with nonstick liners (or parchment paper).
6. Bake the macaroon for 5 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and raise the temperature to 375°F (190°C). Once the oven is up to temperature, put the pans back in the oven and bake for an additional 7 to 8 minutes, or lightly colored.
7. Cool on a rack before filling.