Project 11: Make me a macaroon

My friend Palo sent me on a baking course to perfect the art of making macaroons. And when I say perfect the art I mean stop being intimidated by how complicated they seem and actually try making them.

At the cooking schoo I teamed up with the only other 3 girls/ladies that were there on their own. The rest of the class were couples, mother/daughter duos and small groups of friends. My table of 4 was clearly the best because we all genuinely wanted to be there, as opposed to the other tables where you could easily identify which half of the pair had signed them up for the course and which half was there out of obligation.

The actual macaroon making was surprisingly easy – even the piping wasn’t too bad and that was the task I had anticipated being the most daunting. We were responsible for the purplish pink variety while the other two tables produced pistachio green and neon yellow. Once again I think this gave us the advantage. My table 2, rest of class 0.

The shells were all the same almond flavour but the fillings included spiced white chocolate, lemon cream, peanut butter and jam (these were actually pb and jam sauces rather than raw pb and plain jam) and salted caramel. The last filling was mistakenly abandoned on my table at the end of the lesson so my new friends Clara, Christina, Pria and I accidentally misplaced it (in our stomachs), straight from the piping bag. Cool table 3, rest of class 0.

Here’s a close up of the results:

The chef said the size didn’t matter as long as they were consistent within themselves to pair them up – obviously Team Purple were the greedy guts and made the biggest sets (4 – 0) but they all came out pretty well. Here’s to Palo for making it happen!

PS - I bought my way out of the shop, purchasing what I was missing at home to reproduce these results. 4 pieces of kit later I can totally do this again. Except for the minor details such as measuring my own ingredients, cleaning up after myself and the pastry chef not being there to swoop in and rescue an overworked mixture I see no reason it can't be as easy as it was today...