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.
I have always enjoyed making macaroons, though they don’t always turn out well because of the lovely humid weather in Singapore. I realised, through a couple of tries, that the Italian Meringue method of making macaroons seem to yield more consistent results. The problem with those are that there is sometimes an air pocket between the base and the shell.
Anyway, since this challenge involved the French meringue method, I decided to give it a shot, yet again. To be honest, even though I was disappointed that I didn’t get macaroons (what resulted after the baking hardly qualify as macaroons to me), I wasn’t quite surprised. The meringue started to bleed pretty quickly, and no feet formed. Even though the bottoms were nice and slightly crisp, the top didn’t have that flat, smooth look that I love.
I made some lovely passion fruit jivara ganache, but decided not to use it. Instead, I chose to fill these macaroons with macadamia ice cream. Hopefully this week, I would have some time to bake up proper macaroons using the Italian meringue method, and fill them with the passion fruit milk choc ganache.
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