VIDEO: How to make festive macarons

Impress your friends and family with some delicious and festive macarons. These treats are known to be tricky to make and expensive to buy, but this video will help you achieve success with the macaron.

The recipe I used can be found here.

Tips:

• Use a blender or food processor to grind the almonds. If you use a blender, make sure to occasionally stir the almonds to prevent them from getting stuck.
• You can also use a blender or food processor to mix the powdered sugar and ground almonds.
• You may need to repeatedly put the sugar-almond mixture through the blender or food processor in order to make the mixture fine enough to pass through a sifter.
  • If a part of the mixture still does not pass through the sifter, you can use a spoon to help push it through.
  • If you do not want to spend as much time on this step, you can use almond flour instead of grinding the almonds yourself. However, almond flour tends to be fairly expensive.
• When you fold the almond mixture into the egg whites, the batter should be thick enough to retain some of its shape, but thin enough to partially flatten out.
• Use a piping bag fitted with a round tip to pipe out the disks.
• Pipe the disks onto a silicone mat or parchment paper.
  • If you use parchment paper, bake until macarons barely start to brown. This will help prevent the macarons from sticking to the parchment paper. However, you want to avoid the macarons completely browning, because this will cause the macarons to be hard and not chewy.
• You MUST let the macarons sit for about an hour before putting them in the oven.
  • When you touch the top of the disks, the batter should not stick to your finger.
• For the filling, I used vanilla buttercream and seedless raspberry jam.

+2