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.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! My first Macaron effort. I'm posting them just so I can get DB credit for October but I am really ashamed of them; if I only had the time I would try another batch. I did learn some things, though. I made coffee macarons (no feet showed up) and orange zest macarons (feet showed up but still mega room for improvement). One "scientific" discovery was that I should let the macarons sit in the oven at 200 F for more than 5 mins.- more like 10 mins. This way I got the feet on the orange macarons.
I also found that 7-8 minutes at 375 F was not enough. Next effort I'll try 10, but my 2nd batch, the orange macarons, are a bit overbaked, to say the least, as I left them in for 15 mins!
For the filling I have chosen Nutella - always delicious and I just don't think my little experiment matches up to getting a gorgeous buttercream filling. Hopefully my next batch will. I have just pre-ordered, "I Love Macarons" by Hisako Ogita - I have always been a person who buys a book as the solution to whatever problem arises so hopefully this wonderful looking book will do the trick.
The ray of hope is that they tasted really good - particularly the coffee macarons.
