Where to begin....?

 my first successful batch of macarons

 I had heard of macarons quite a while before I actually managed to taste one. Mostly what I heard was how difficult they are to make, how utterly delicious they are and got the impression that to be able to succeed at making macarons you had to be a truly talented pastry chef. It was all quite intimidating. And mostly wrong, apart from the bit about them being delicious!


 My first taste of macarons was while on holiday in South Africa, we stumbled upon a tiny cake shop hidden away in a corner of Cape Town, we were treating ourselves to some delicious cakes when I saw I display of macarons on the counter. There were six rows of brightly coloured little macarons and they looked so perfect! As I was stood there drooling the lovely lady in the shop asked me if I wanted to try one, well how could I say no! It was delicious! I'm still not sure how I ended up still buying cake instead of clearing the shop of their supply of macarons! It was a while again before my next taste of macarons, a tiny chocolate example which was part of a delicious chocolate dessert I had at Michael Caines restaurant at ABode in Manchester. All the desserts on the menu had looked delicious but when I saw the chocolate dessert had a macaron I just knew that was what I was going to have and it didn't disappoint. In fact the macaron was the best part of the whole dish and was quite possibly the start of what is likely to be a life long love affair with macarons.

 At first my interest bordered on obsession, trying to find anywhere in Manchester that sold these little delights. Not an easy task! I can tell you now that if you don't fancy making your own there are one or two places to get your fix. Marks & Spencer currently have 'macaroons' in their dessert range and to be honest they're not bad, they even had a special jubilee edition pack which was particularly tasty. Even better though are the macarons I have tasted from 'English Rose Bakery' based in Manchester. You can get them from Selfridges in the Trafford Centre, although the quality is a bit hit and miss, I suspect more down to Selfridges handling of the macarons than anything in the macarons themselves. One thing I have learned from my search for a macaron fix was to be wary of anything too 'packaged', mass produced macarons with long sell by dates and, in my case, a packet saying 'made in Belgium' roughly translates to macarons made a lot longer ago than the day before and macarons are best eaten a day after being baked and filled. 
The best macarons I have ever tasted, and most macaron lovers would agree I think, come from Ladurée. I was lucky enough to find myself in London recently and being near Covent Garden I just had to try some Ladurée macarons. Oh my word, they are awesome! The only ones I have tasted that I don't really mind the expense of buying them, they are definitely worth it. I'm off to London again later this year so you can bet I will make sure I get a quick trip to Ladurée to treat myself to some of their more exotic flavours! One day I hope to go to Paris, I'm ashamed to say I've never been, and hopefully try at least one from every patisserie I can find! Until then...


 I got to thinking about having a go at making macarons myself. I did a lot of reading, searching out recipes in books and online, and the more I read the more intimidated I became and the more convinced I was that I would never be able to tackle the tricky little macaron. Then I found 'BraveTart', a blog about the amazing Stella Parks and her baking antics. Her posts about macarons are truly inspiring as you can see from the many comments on her posts, these two posts http://bravetart.com/blog/MacaronMyths and http://bravetart.com/blog/TheTenCommandments are particularly helpful to any want-to-be macaron baker. As you can see in this post http://bravetart.com/blog/EatMacarons, I'm not the only one that finds Stella truly inspiring! I'm not going to repeat all of Stella's advice here but I do recommend that everyone read her macaron posts before having a go, you'll find yourself feeling quite liberated!
So, with an armful of cookbooks in hand, including Pierre Hermé's 'Macarons', and all of the advice and recipes on 'BraveTart', I decided it was time to have a go!

It's probably important to mention that there are two methods for making macarons, the more complicated Italian meringue method which involves hot sugar syrup being whisked into the egg whites, and the simpler French meringue method which involves whisking granulated sugar into the egg whites. I decided to keep things simple at first and chose a recipe from Dorling Kindersley 'Step-by-Step Baking', there are four macaron recipes in this book, all of which use the french meringue method. being a complete chocolate addict I decided to give the chocolate macarons a try! I had a whole weekend to play with macarons so I had a few attempts, half expecting the entire weekend to be a total disaster but on my third attempt I felt like I had hit the jackpot, one tray of macarons came out absolutely perfect. Smooth tops, perfect little feet and so tasty! Just take a look at the photo and you will see!

 I'll write more in detail later about the ups and downs, and what I learned in those first few batches later. I plan to make a lot of macarons, I have a lot of ideas for flavours and themes. In each post I will give you the recipes I used and the little tweaks I made so you can try the original recipe yourself as well as my version. I like to bake lots of other sweet treats too so don't be too surprised if the occasional cake or pastry finds its way on here too!