macarons

Oh, good lord. This one took a lot out of me. Before we begin, let me just start out by saying I fucked up.

So, as many of you are probably already aware, macarons are sort of a thing, especially here in LA. They're trendy. They're cute, which makes them instagrammable. They're not something you just whip up at home, they're the type of cookie you plan a date in the city with a pal for. They're the Long Term Girlfriend of confections. They're seven dollars each to prevent you from inhaling an entire platter of them at once.

And then you have me, somebody who A. has no friends and B. refuses to eat less than four pounds of any type of food in one sitting. I got greedy. I really wanted these things to work, but the universe reached down into my life and told me I didn't deserve to have them, at least not in their pristine, professionally-produced form. Not on my budget.

I got the recipe for the cookies from a blog called The Blenderist, and the recipe for the filling from another blog called A Side of Sweet. Saying I modified these recipes only slightly does not do the mess I made justice; I butchered these things. You're going to hate me when you see the pictures of how they turned out at the end, I guarentee it. Let's get this over with.

for the cookies:

one cup of aquafaba

one cup of almond meal

two lemons

a handful of blackberries

a half of a cup of sugar

a cup of water

for the filling:

a half of a cup of blackberries

a half of a cup of sugar

a half of a cup of water

two tablespoons of coconut oil

one lemon

By this point I think you should all know how to procure aquafaba. We fuck it up here a lot. It is the beast that refuses to be tamed.

Something I feel like I should also mention is the fact that I really only skimmed the cookie recipe before setting out to make them, assuming simply that "it would just be fine." A word of advice: do not do this. Read the fucking recipe. I guess in my head the fact that I've been doing this for two weeks means I'm a real chef. Never delude yourself in this way.

For example, one thing I actually didn't realize until I was already knee-deep into this experiment is the fact that half of the liquid aquafaba actually gets dumped in with the almond meal and sugar mixture before the rest gets whipped up. I almost ruined it even worse than I actually did right out of the gate. Thankfully though I did have the foresight to keep the recipe up on my laptop while I was doing this, if not as a definitive guiding light then at the very least as a source of inspiration.

So there I was, staring down my dry ingredients, with an inappropriately hot measuring cup of bean water in my hand (DON'T do it like that; let it cool off before you use it). It was at this point that I had my first very bright idea: these things could use a little bit of color.

The original recipe actually called for food dye, but unfortunately, being the shabby loser that I am, there was none in my pantry. My invented solution was to take a tablespoon of the aquafaba and toss that into the ol' blender-cup with a couple of the blackberries from the pile of ingredients reserved for the filling. Boom, homemade food coloring. Did it work? Not really. But it happened, so I have to include it.

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Well, that's not quite what I was going for, but there's certainly no going back now. Moving on: the second really awesome idea I had was to add a ton of hot, boiling liquid sugar to the delicate, very underdeveloped aquafaba foam that I had been painstakingly nurturing up until this point. Another thing I missed on my initial glance-over of the original recipe was the fact that there was a tempering step to producing the meringue, as opposed to my usual method of just dumping in raw sugar until it gets all sticky and nice. This did not turn out sticky and nice, and it's nobody's fault but my own. Mistakes made:

1. I didn't reduce the sugar and water mixture enough to make it potent. I got impatient, I may as well have just dissolved the granules in the water and microwaved it for thirty seconds. It would have produced exactly the same result.

2. I didn't whip the aquafaba into a stable enough state to accommodate the sugar-water. Part of the problem could have very well been laziness and not putting enough elbow grease into it, but a good amount of the reason for this was that I was absolutely terrified of burning the sugar on the stove. I was running back and forth and the meringue actually fell a lot between rounds of beating. That's something they don't teach you in school.

3. I didn't give the liquid a chance to cool and condense before throwing it into the ring. It was so hot I could literally see it popping bubbles of the foam that it wasn't even touching. I'm a fucking mess.

It's almost painful watching this part in hindsight. So young. So naïve.

Here's me fucking trying; it was a similar issue to the one I was having with the aquafaba for the zucchini fritters. I promise they were two separate batches. I'm a terrible cook, but I'm no cheat.

It didn't get fluffier, it just turned into soup.

For the filling, I just kind of dumped everything into a small pot and hoped for the best. It ended up looking NOTHING like it was supposed to. I didn't whisk it after I cooked it, I didn't do fucking anything. I deserved what I got.

I poured my slop into a shitty freezer bag to pipe out the cookies but it was so loose it was literally dribbling out of the tip like wet diarrhea. Not ideal. I would say that this was the point where I actually knew this idea wasn't going to work but the truth is I had been feeling that way even as I was laying out the ingredients for the gif at the beginning.

Here's the filling after spending way too much time over the heat. It tasted alright. If my goal was to make blackberry jelly, it would have been a moderate success. But, unfortunately, that was not my intention.

They're out of the furnace and slightly burnt, no less. The orignal recipe called for a 250° oven. Two hundred and fifty fucking degrees. I had them in there for forty-five minutes and ended up needing to crank up the heat when I peeked and saw that they were literally still wet.

My calculations apparently were slightly off. I ain't no rocket scientist, I'm just a hungry bitch.

There's no easy way to say it: this little episode was an unmitigated disaster. To call these things macarons would be a blatant mockery of macarons everywhere; they ended up being more like weird little jam pies. So, instead of macarons, I'm gonna call them macaronis. This is both a playfully self-deprecating symbol of their mediocrity and also an homage to my own Italian roots.

They don't taste all that bad, but I cannot recommend giving them away as a gift unless you're looking to leave a bad impression. Save these for your least favorite person's birthday. TGIF.