Melbourne Made Macarons

Well, apparently you can make them in THIS country too. So having recovered (a bit) from jet lag, Jeff and I had a go at making Paris style macarons at home.

The challenges :

- apparently Aussie almond meal is a bit wetter than european, so we dried it a bit in the still-warm-from-something-else oven. Can't say it made much difference.
- egg white in this country comes in EGGS, not (as in our class) in litre bottles. So we had to work out how many to crack to get 2 lots of 80 grams of white. Five, it turns out.
- what filling to use? Chocolate ganache promises good results, but surely this Caramel Buerre Sale (salted butter) can't be that hard to make?
- what heat and cooking time? Gotta adjust for the fan forced oven, and they are all a little different of course.

Everything went pretty much to plan - making Italian Merinque is a complete doddle if you have a good mixer, and a thermometer. Our almond meal is possibly more coarse than it should be - a whiz first would have helped.

The first tray got cooked for 12 minutes at exactly half way between 120 and 160 on our dial (which I hesitantly say must be 140, but it's not marked). Looked good, a little hard to get the bikkies off the tray. So we bumped up to 14 minutes, and it was perfect.

Then I started filling them. Hmm, this caramel is a bit tough, isn't it? Hope it's runny enough to be a filling.

A few minutes later - whoa, this caramel is runny, isn't it? Hope it's firm enough to be a filling.

A few minutes later - help, the tops are sliding off the bases!

Finally - well, they seem to have settled down now. Definitely need to make the filling a tad more firm. Here's a nice result.

And for future reference, here's what happens if the caramel is too runny. Drips all over the counter. Oh no, what shall we do (schlurp, schlurp).

What do they taste like? Pretty darned nice!