Baking Interlude: Macarons!

Happy Memorial Day, everyone! My sister and I were home from school on Friday for Memorial Day weekend while our parents were at work, so of course that called for making something that would be likely to get us yelled at. We looked through my extensive list of recipes that I need to try and settled on the most difficult one: macarons. We've wanted to try macarons since we first saw them on a cute food blog about two years ago, but the closest we came to tasting them were frozen ones from Trader Joe's, which we were too impatient to defrost. We came this close to trying them when we saw them in a bakery while on vacation in London, but it was not to be.

Ok, they are supposed to be difficult to make, from what I've seen on the internet. Apparently you need to age the egg whites, and triple-sift everything, and you shouldn't even try to make them if it's raining or if the moon is in the last quarter or if you're prone to demonic possession or something. So, I wasn't sure if this was going to work out, but then I saw the post on Brave Tart busting these myths, and decided to just wing it. So we used egg whites straight from the fridge (have teenage girls ever been renowned for their patience?) and taunted the storm gods by making macarons in the dripping humidity while it was drizzling outside.

Here they are in the oven! Granted, I have no idea what they're supposed to look like while baking, but this looks good enough for me. Sorry, I keep forgetting to actually take pictures of the steps while I'm doing this, so I mostly have shots of them finished. I used Brave Tart's recipe, which I'm linking because I still don't know the proper etiquette for posting other people's recipes. I basically just whipped the egg whites and sugar, dumped in the dry ingredients, folded them together until it looked like a batter, and piped them onto parchment paper.

While they were baking, I put together a chocolate mousse to fill them. I just stirred 4 oz chocolate chips into 4 oz hot cream, then added 2 tablespoons of butter and chilled it. Next time, I'll probably leave out the butter, because it didn't set as firmly as I would have liked.

Here they are all baked! I notice that they didn't develop that cute little foamy looking strip that I gather is called the "foot", but they tasted good. They were a little bit tastier than a straight meringue, nutty from the almond and almost a bit chewy on the inside. I whipped up my chilled mousse and piped it into the shells.

If you look closely in the background of that last picture, you can see the head of one of my cats :)

As you may have noticed, I also made some heart shaped ones, which I though came out even cuter than the plain circles. Here's one finished:

This is actually filled with a chocolate-cinnimon buttercream that I had in my freezer from making cupcakes a few weeks ago, because I ran out of mousse two thirds of the way through. The cinnamon was good, but we all pretty much agreed that the chocolate was the best.