Macaron crazy

This past weekend, my best mate came up to visit me. We spent the weekend making macarons, star gazing at the beach and kicking back with a few comedies. The macarons were a new thing.. I felt like baking something and she's often intrigued by the things I make. So I whipped out my new Womens Weekly cookbooks and searched for something different. Macarons look good so we went out and bought the ingredients then got cracking.

She did most of the hard work while I looked on. Considering I had never made them before, I was curious as to how they'd turn out. We ended up with two different batches.. one slightly better than the other but they both tasted pretty awesome. However, there were a few problems with them.. they didn't have those little "feet" and stuck to the baking paper. With these issues stuck in my brain, I decided to give it a go for myself. They'd make a great gift for my colleagues at school, and I wasn't really in the mood to make cookies this time.

After doing some research, I found a few hints and tricks to get the "perfect" macaron. Before trying out the same recipes, I made sure to buy the expensive baking paper. I've always used the cheap brand and its never failed me before but something about these precious sweets made me think it probably was the cheap paper that made them stick. So with my new baking paper in hand, I made my first batch.

The first set came out with cracks... oven temperature was too high..
The second set came out pretty much close to perfect... they had feet, smooth surface and came easily off the baking paper!

Then I tried a modified ganache recipe. I warmed the cream with mint leaves, let them soak off the heat for a while, then returned the bowl to the stove with the white chocolate bits.

After the ganache had cooled, I started spreading it on.. When I finished putting on the ganache, I had a bite.

hmmm.. quirky taste.. the mint leaves do give it that minty taste but it just taste strange.. sweet but strange..

So I tried again the next day.. My macarons are getting better, they're smooth and have feet... This time I stuck to the original white chocolate ganache and a chocolate ganache. For a variation, after spreading the white chocolate ganache, I rolled the macaron in crushed candy canes. I had a bit of trouble though.. the ganache didn't have enough white chocolate so it wasn't as thick as it should have been thus resulting in the ganache running down the side of the macaron along with the crushed candy canes. Sigh... I put less ganache but it was trickier to roll it in the crushed canes and wouldn't pick up as much. At least the milk chocolate ganache was thick enough and they turned out really well. Decided to leave those plain though.

I was able to wrap up 3 rectangular boxes with 5 macarons in each (2 candy cane, 3 milk chocolate) tied up with a red ribbon. They looked pretty awesome. Should've taken a photo.. will do that when I wrap the next set up. I brought them to work and gave them to the librarian, the laptop techie and the technology techie. Hope they like them and they didn't get cracked in the process.

I haven't quite made enough "perfect" ones yet to wrap up for the rest of my colleagues so I have to do another batch. I have so many dud macarons.. I'm going to end up a diabetic with this much sugar at my disposal... ><"