Cooking Made Easy: Macarons

As you may know from this post I got a box with macaron recipes for Christmas. Today I decided that it was time to try the first flavour namely strawberry macarons with mint. It wasn´t only one of the most yummy recipes but also one of the easiest so I dared to give it a try. I had never been making macarons before and I found out that some things about the making were easier than I had thought while other things were way more difficult. I will tell you about the difficulties later but let´s start off with the recipe:

What you´ll need for 13 macarons:

For the meringues:

1 egg white
1 pinch of salt
20g sugar
green or red food coloring
50g powdered almonds

75g icing sugar
1 knife point baking powder

For the stuffing:

100g butter (at room temperature)
50g strawberries
50ml strawberry syrup
1 tablespoon of freshly minced mint

How to proceed:

1. Whisk the egg white and the salt stiff.
2. Add the normal sugar and the food coloring and whisk stiff again.
3. Mix the almonds, icing sugar and baking powder and add it to the egg white.
4. Put the mixture into an icing bag with a round hole and make 26 small spots on a baking sheet.
5. Leave the meringues on the baking sheet for 20 minutes before putting them in the oven for 15 minutes at 150°C.
6. While the meringues cool down you can make the stuffing. Purée the clean strawberries with the syrup and add the mash to the butter step by step. At the end also add the mint.
7. Put the strawberry butter on the lower side of 13 meringues. (This works best whit the icing bag as well.)
8. Top the macarons with the other 13 meringues and put them in a box. Leave them in the fridge for at least 2 hours.

9. Enjoy!

Now which problems did I have when making the macarons? First of all it is not that easy working with and icing bag but you´ll get used to it. Then I didn´t manage to make all the meringues the same size because my first spots on the baking sheet were a bit too big but that´s a matter of practice as well. If you don´t feel like you can handle this you could buy yourselves one of these special macarons baking papers made of silicon as they have circles on them with the right macaron size. The greatest difficulty was the colour of the macarons as they turned a bit brownish in the oven which isn´t supposed to happen. I don´t know how to fix that problem yet but next time I´ll simply colour my macarons red and nobody will notice they turned out a bit darker... And now the result of my hard work:

 

I think that they turned out really yummy, tasking gorgeously of almonds but if you don´t like butter you should definitely find a different stuffing! Have you tried to make your own macarons so far? If so do you know how I can prevent mine from becoming brownish in the oven? If you haven´t tried to make macarons at home you should definitely give it a try, it´s easier than you think!