big dirt garden

Yes, I’m still in France. Well, in my kitchen at least. In keeping with the French theme, macarons surfaced to the top of the recipe pile. I’m not referring to the sweet, shredded coconut kind, although those macaroons are very good. No, these French treats are pillowy almond sandwich cookies that typically house a gooey center of fruit or chocolate filling. I’m not sure where I first tasted a macaron, but I am sure it wasn’t in France.

Now the reason I’ve never tried to make these is that the sandwich cookie part is very delicate. Look at them wrong and they might disintegrate. And the meringue part didn’t seem too cooperative either. But since I recently conquered making homemade marshmallow, I figured I could handle this.

I found a few recipes that were simple enough. A recipe for Passion Fruit Macarons came out on top. Bright orange and tantalizing, I was trying to recreate a memory of a milk chocolate and passion fruit macaron I ate at Pierre Herme in Paris. Over a year after eating an entire box of macarons in one sitting, the passion fruit one still stands out. ‘An entire box?’ you ask. Mais oui! They were going to disintegrate. Haven’t you been reading?

I headed to the store and immediately hit a stumbling block. I could not find the passion fruit puree. “It’s out of stock.”, I was told. My remaining puree choices were raspberry and prickly pear. I went with prickly pear. I’ll make Texas macarons! I headed home and continued undaunted.

Combining the cookie ingredients was easy enough. Even making the sugar syrup wasn’t too bad. Just a word of warning though, meringue is super sticky. You could patch drywall with this stuff. It whipped up and folded into the almond base just fine. But I got it all over the place. No, the trouble started when I baked the cookies. Halfway in the cookies started cracking like the soil in a 40-year Texas drought.

Even though the recipe called for a 400° oven, clearly that was too hot. But it was too late. I managed to salvage two “good” halves thinking, ‘well, they all taste fine and I’ll have two good ones to photograph’.

But when I attempted assembly I realized I had forgotten a very crucial ingredient in the filling, the heavy cream. The thickener. The glue to the drywall so to speak. So yes, that sealed the fate of my macaron massacre. Or macaron meltdown.

In case you are wondering, macarons should look like perfect sandwich pillows, should be eaten under the Eiffel Tower while the lights twinkle and the sun sets. Not over your kitchen sink as the filling oozes out.