An almost success

Last night I made my first attempt at macarons. After spending a few days perusing the Tartelette and Kitchen Musings blogs, I felt I was ready to give it a shot, and settled on a strawberry macaron recipe at Tartelette. I probably should have made something more basic, but I thought the dried strawberries sounded interesting. In sum, the whole affair was almost successful.

The first step was drying the strawberries. The procedure for this seemed simple enough - slice them thin and pop them in the oven at 250 degrees for about an hour. Pull them out and let them cool completely. I followed the steps exactly, but here is where I got confused. If you leave the strawberries to cool on the parchment on the sheet, the parchment seems to retain some moisture and keep the strawberries soggy. When I noticed this, I pulled the strawberries off the parchment to finish cooling, but I don't think I did it fast enough. The strawberries were not as dry as I would have liked them to be when I put them in the food-pro with the almond flour.

I snapped the photo below right as I pulled the macaron shells out of the oven. At first glance, they seemed almost perfect - excellent results for my first try. The cookies were glossy with a nice round dome and even had little feet. I was so excited I called my husband (he was away on business) to let him know the results.















Well... as soon as I got off the phone, my almost perfect macarons became decidedly not perfect. In cooling, the shells began to crack and some started to sink in the middle. I pulled one off the parchment for inspection to discover that inside the fragile skin the inside of the cookie was still very gooey and moist. I think that somehow I underbaked them.

Into the garbage they went.

I hope to try again on Sunday.