I finally got time to try a recipe from Pierre Hermé's macaron book. I've been a little daunted by the idea and not just because of the French text. Anything using hot sugar has generally been a recipe for disaster in my kitchen (get it, recipe ... for disaster ... heh) and all the macarons in the book are made with Italian meringue.
I thought I'd drag myself away from chocolate, well almost. These are caramel with dark chocolate ganache filling. They tasted pretty good, unfortunately they don't look all that great. The sugar syrup makes the meringue more stable and it was actually easier to get the right consistency but I think I made them a bit thick so they didn't dry out enough. Hence no feet and some cracked shells :(
I also made it way more difficult for myself by making a rather small quantity. I ended up trying to weigh out 14g of egg white! Luckily I now have an electronic scale, but still, I'll not be doing that again. Plus you don't get enough to scoff and they are so tasty!
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