Vanilla Macarons with Mousse di Ricotta e Vino Santo

Jamie bribed me out of my comfort zone again.

Recently I made lovely mousses for my family visit and therefore had left over egg whites.  I had no clue what to do with them.

Anne suggested Meringue, so I made a Meringue Coffee Cake with some of the egg whites, leaving me still with about the half of used ones.

Jamie then suggested to try my hand on Macarons directing me to MacTweets a wonderful blog run by her and Deeba. It is a great ressouce for erveryone who wants to try his/her skills on Macarons!

My first thought was: NO WAY!

It seemed so much work and so complicated and I was sure I’d fail anyway… but I was curious so I read my way through all the information on this site. First I began with Jamie’s guide, copied and printed the Macaron template, read through Meeta’s wonderful article full of useful hints and tips and finnally ended up with “Demystifiying Macarons” by Helen Dujardin.

While doing all this I was still arguing with myself to just dump those egg whites rather than risk a failure.  The other part of me was arguing that IF it was a failure I would dump it too so I could easily give it a try…

To cut a long story short: As you can see by the pictures here, the second voice won and I braved my way through making macarons.

I used the basic recipe given in Helen’s guide and Jamie’s instructions.

I flavoured my macs with a few drops home made vanilla syrup and colored them with curcuma - hence the yellow color.

Aftermath:

As though you can’t see it too well (fortunately for me *hehe*) from the pics I shot and chose to show you, there is lots and lots of space for improvement…

• I think the dough might have needed a few more folds.
• My almonds were not ground enough hence the surface is not as smooth and shiny… but I liked the little almond bits while I was eating them
• I think I should sift the sugar and almonds better or more often. I had a few lumps in the dough too.
• While piping the macs I discovered that I didn’t own a tip that was wide enough to pipe them comfortably. *makes note to self* need to buy a tip that is wide enough.

I did not bother with making a filling on my own this time, was too exhausted by the Mac-Experience *lol*

I thought this wonderful Mousse di Ricotta e Vino Santo from La Fattoria Vialla must be a perfect companion for my first macs and so it was!

So if you want to see lots and lots of other and way better Macs than my humble versions go and visit MacTweets!

You will see I am not kidding ;o)

Thanks Jamie for making me try these!