Today on Sugar Spun Run, I'll be showing you how to make chocolate macarons.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers, Sam here!
And today, I am so excited to be sharing another carefully tested, well researched,
and perfected recipe.
This is a chocolate variation of my French macaron recipe that I just recently shared.
If you haven't checked out that video, you might wanna give it a look.
Especially if you are a new macron maker because over there I shared a lot of detailed tips.
I'm not going to go into quite as much technical detail today,
but I still think this video will be super helpful,
so let's get started. Now, as with any macaron recipe,
we are going to start with our egg whites.
You are going to need a hundred and ten grams of egg whites for today's recipe.
And I don't recommend using the kind that you find sold in the store in a carton.
Those don't always whip up properly,
and it's very important for this recipe that the egg whites whip up into a meringue.
So I'm just going to pass the yolk back and forth to separate out that egg white.
You won't need the yolks for today's recipe.
You can save them. You can discard them, do whatever you want with them.
I'm actually gonna feed mine to my dogs, but you do not need them to make the macarons.
So we've separated those out and then I'm going to pour my egg white into a clean,
dry measuring cup. I'm going to turn on my scale
because weights are really important when you're making macarons.
They're just a little extra insurance to make sure everything turns out properly.
And I'm just going to add my egg whites to this measuring cup until I have a hundred and ten grams.
Now I find that I typically need about three egg whites,
sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, to get a hundred and ten grams.
And you do want to be using room temperature egg whites for this recipe.
If you get even a little bit of yolk in there with eggs,
you're going to want to toss the egg white out because it's been contaminated.
It has some fat in there that will keep the egg whites from whipping properly.
So that's why I am cracking the eggs here and then, once I'm sure that they're clean,
I don't have any yolk in there, then I add them to the measuring cup.
Let's see, are we gonna get a hundred and ten today out of three?
We have a hundred and thirteen grams. I'm going to be super technical
because I like my measurements to be exact.
So I'm going to get this to a hundred and ten grams.
And there we go. Now, One thing that I've talked about previously is aging your egg whites.
What this means is letting them sit
so that some of the water can evaporate out of them. You're supposed to let them sit this way
for twenty four hours, and I always cover mine with a piece of plastic wrap.
This’ll keep anything, like too much dust or any bugs from getting in here.
We'll just pierce the plastic wrap
because the important thing is that water needs to be able to evaporate.
Not everyone ages their egg whites, but it adds a little bit of extra security to your meringue.
And it is pretty humid here today. It's raining pretty hard,
so I like that extra insurance of using aged egg whites.
Now, of course, I already have some aged. Let me grab those.
And now let's move on to our dry ingredients. You're going to need a sifter for this next step.
And we are going to need a hundred and forty five grams each of almond flour and powdered sugar.
For the almond flour, I recommend using a super fine,
blanched almond flour. Let's go ahead and add this into our sifter.
And we want to catch any lumps of almond flour that might be lingering in here.
We don't want them in our macarons or our macarons are going to be bumpy.
This is mostly worked through, so I'll add my powdered sugar.
Again, this is a hundred and forty five grams. As many of you know,
powdered sugar also has a tendency to clump.
We don't want any clumps today. The final ingredient we're going
to be adding is ten grams of dark cocoa powder,
which we wanna catch any lumps from that too.
Now, dark cocoa powder is my preference because I like the taste and the color
that it's going to lend to the macarons,
but I will include some notes in the recipe card in case you're
trying to use a different kind of cocoa powder,
just what will work best and what to expect.
And you can see we have some big clumps in there.
Now, I'm just going to use my spoon to gently break these up,
see what we can work through. And we have a couple of lumps remaining.
This doesn't look like anything significant,
so I don't need to add any more almond flour in or anything like that.
I’m just going to set that aside. Now, let's just briefly whisk these
ingredients together to get them nicely combined.
Okay, now let's set this aside and we're going to head back to those egg whites,
our aged egg whites. Before you touch those though,
you're going to need a large, clean, dry,
mixing bowl. There can't be any grease in here,
no smudges, anything that. I also recommend you avoid using plastic or silicone mixing bowls,
glass or metal is best. My egg whites have been aging for about twenty four hours.
I'll add them to my mixing bowl. And for today's recipe,
I highly recommend using an electric mixer.
You don't wanna do this by hand. You could also use a stand mixer.
That would be fine. But I personally prefer to use my hand mixer
because I can get a better feel for the meringue that way and I'm less likely to overmix it.
Now we'll beat these on medium speed until they are nice and foamy.
That'll just be about thirty seconds. Alright,
now we are going to add our cream of tartar.
I use an eighth teaspoon of cream of tartar.
This ingredient isn't one hundred percent essential for your meringue.
Some people don't use it. But for me, it helps stabilize the meringue.
It's a little bit of extra insurance. And, as I said,
it's very humid and rainy here today,
so we're using the cream of tartar. For flavor,
I like to add a little bit of salt. This is just an eighth teaspoon.
And now we're just going to beat this again for another thirty seconds on medium speed.
The cream of tartar won't necessarily get completely broken up in this time,
that's fine. Alright, the next ingredient we need is ninety five grams of granulated sugar.
If you can find super fine caster sugar, that will work even better.
It's just not readily available where I live.
Now, I'm going to add just a tablespoon of this sugar.
And I'm going to continue to beat on medium speed for another thirty seconds.
We want to incorporate the granulated sugar slowly, so after thirty seconds has passed,
I'll add the next tablespoon. We’re almost there.
And we'll just continue until all of the sugar has been added.
So we add the sugar slowly
because doing this helps us to build a stronger meringue than we would get if we were to add it all at
once and if we would have our mixer on a super high speed.
We are building this meringue to be nice and stable,
which will just give us stronger, better textured macarons in the end.
Alright, let's add the last of our granulated sugar.
Give it another thirty seconds. Alright,
we'll pause here. Your sugar should be pretty well dissolved,
but, as you can see, we're not at stiff peaks yet,
which is our end goal. And here's where I like to add my flavoring and any food color I'm using.
We'll add a teaspoon of vanilla extract, but vanilla isn't going to make them taste like vanilla.
It's going to bring out that chocolate flavor even more.
Now, obviously, there's cocoa powder in these macarons.
That is unfortunately not going to go a very long way in making
the macarons a really rich brown color.
It will make them brown and I chose a dark cocoa powder which will make them a
bit deeper in color than a natural cocoa powder,
but they're still not going to be a super rich brown.
If it's important to you that yours look very chocolatey,
here is where you would add any brown food coloring well.
Now, we'll continue to beat this mixture on medium to medium high speed,
and we're not going to stop until we have super thick, fluffy peaks.
I'll show you what that looks like in just a minute
—couple minutes. I do wanna pause right here to show you peaks that are not quite stiff enough.
I don't want anyone stopping here, so let's just take a look at what you don't want.
So as you might be able to hopefully see here,
they're—we’re forming a little bit of a peak here,
but the peak is flimsy. It's folding over on itself.
You can't even see the peak on this camera
because it's just folding so much. We want our peaks to be super stiff.
They shouldn't be marshmallow-y or soft like this, so we're going to keep mixing.
Okay, this is what we're looking for. So you can see the peak that's formed,
it's standing tall. It's holding its shape.
The peak that formed in the bowl is holding its shape.
As I was whisking, the whisks were leaving tracks or trails in the meringue.
That's a good sign that it's sturdy and we're ready to continue.
Let's grab our cocoa powder mixture from earlier.
And from this point on, we are just going to be using a spatula to mix everything together.
And since our eggw whites have reached a nice meringue and stiff peaks, we can use silicone,
which is what I'll be using. We are going to add our almond flour mixture about a third at a time.
So I'll add about a third of this here.
And I am just going to gently fold the ingredients together using my spatula
until the dry ingredients are combined.
And this process that we're doing here is called macaronage.
It's just the process of essentially deflating our egg whites and incorporating our two ingredients,
our two bowls of ingredients that we have here.
This step is very important and this is where a lot of home bakers mess up,
so I wanna make sure I show you exactly
what this process looks like
because doing too much macaronage or not doing enough macaronage can be detrimental to your macarons.
I've added two thirds. I'm just scraping the sides of the bowl
and I'm making sure I'm scraping through the bottom of the bowl as well.
And we'll add our last bit. And I'm just folding the dry ingredients into the wet, the wet into the dry,
scraping the sides, and scraping through.
Even though we went through all of that work to whip up our egg whites
and it's very important that they be at stiff peaks before we get to this point,
macaronage is interesting because we are now deflating the whites
that we just spent all that time whipping up.
One thing I like to do is once the dry ingredients and the egg whites are nicely combined,
I'll start using my spatula to sort of smush the batter against the sides of the bowl.
And what we're doing is we are eliminating a lot of air bubbles.
The air bubbles in here can lead to hollow macarons.
They can lead to bumpy macarons. We want to eliminate these.
And I'll scrape my spatula in case there are any dry ingredients clinging to it,
scraping the sides, scraping through the middle,
and just smushing the batter. Now this step is all about
getting our batter to a very particular texture.
So what we're looking for is once the ingredients are nicely combined,
the batter should start to look a little bit shiny and it should flow smoothly from your spatula.
You should—so you can see mine just broke there.
We're not quite there, but we're actually closer than I thought we would be
since I haven't been folding very long.
Now, for this recipe, I actually like to say that you can just barely make a figure eight.
That's a good sign that the batter's ready. Not quite there.
Once I get close, I only do a couple folds at a time before testing again because too many folds,
you'll overdo it and your macarons will be wrinkly on top or they'll spread too much.
So we wanna be careful. Let's go ahead and try this again.
So I'm able to form a figure eight,
and what I want to do is I want to make sure that this batter still flows.
I want to count about fifteen seconds
And here's where my chocolate macarons are slightly different than my classic French macarons.
With the classic French, after I make the figure eight,
I'll count fifteen seconds
and I want to make sure that the eight is dissolving back into the batter.
With chocolate macarons, I don't like to go quite that far.
I find when I do, the batter is usually a little bit overdone.
So what I like to see is that the edges are softening slightly,
but I don't want to be getting
as much flow back into the batter as I would with my classic macarons.
So I'm actually pretty happy with this, so we can go ahead and start piping our macarons.
Now here, I have a large piping bag that I have fitted with an 804 tip,
which is my favorite when I'm making macarons.
I'm gonna put the bag in a large cup, and we'll pour the batter in.
Try to do this here without making a mess.
No promises though. We're going to be piping our macarons on parchment paper lined baking sheets.
Parchment is my preference. Some people like Silpat. Use whichever works better for you.
Now, I like to sort of glue my parchment paper down by adding just
a little bit of batter into the corners,
will keep the parchment paper from flying up.
You don't have to do this. It’s just—works best for me.
And make sure you flatten that. Okay,
now there is some technique when you're piping your macarons.
You want to make sure you're holding the bag straight up and down.
And we are going to pipe these into about
one and a half inch circles—about—and then flick your wrist at the end,
kind of in a “c” motion. You're probably going to notice some small peaks on your macarons,
we'll address those in a moment. I'm not doing a very good job of keeping these in a straight line.
But your macarons will spread a little bit,
so you do wanna give them some space on the baking sheet.
And my piping tip is kissing the surface of the macaron the whole time,
it is not above the macaron if that makes sense.
That's all I’ll do here. Set my batter aside.
Now if you remember from my classic French macaron recipe,
the next thing we have to do is bang our pans.
You can do this directly on your counter. It makes a lot of noise
and I have napping children.
And they always seem to be napping
when I get to this point in my recipe, so I just set some dish towels down,
make sure they're nice and even. And then I'm going to bang the pans very firmly on the dish towels.
I'm going to do this like five or six times,
four or five times, I guess. And I do this very, very forcefully.
You may even notice some shaking of the camera because of the force that I use to do this.
And as you do this, you'll notice that any peaks that were on your macaron surfaces from
when you piped them,
they should be settling down into the macaron. You may also notice some bubbles forming.
That's good. This is actually why we do the pan baking—banging
because we want those bubbles to rise to the surface and escape.
Otherwise, they're going to cause problems in our macrons while they're baking.
I’m gonna do one more. Okay,
two more. I lied,
I did like eight on this one just because I kept seeing bubbles.
But I'm pretty happy with how these are looking,
so I'm going to set them aside and pipe my next sheet.
And we'll go ahead and bang these. Alright,
now the macarons need to rest before they can go into the oven.
They will need to sit until a skin forms on the surface
and if you were to run your finger over the surface,
it should feel dry and not tacky or sticky.
How long this takes can really vary depending on a lot of things,
like how humid it is outside of your house
and just exactly how much you macaronaged your batter.
Typically for me with this recipe, it usually takes twenty to thirty minutes
but you'll always want to check yours before baking them.
While they're resting, I like to get my oven preheating to three hundred
and twenty five degrees Fahrenheit.
And make sure you have your rack arranged to the center of your oven.
Now to fill these macarons, I like to make a rich chocolate ganache filling.
And this is going to need to set up before we can actually use it in our macarons,
so I like to get this started now while they're resting.
You're going to need a cup of heavy cream
and we're going to add this to a small saucepan on the stovetop,
and we're just going to bring this to a simmer.
While this is coming to a simmer, you are going to want to prepare your chocolate.
You'll need eight ounces of chocolate. You can chop up some chocolate bars.
You could even use semi sweet chocolate chips, not my preference,
but it works here. Or you can use couverture chocolate,
which is what I am using today. Place these in a small to medium sized, heat proof
bowl and set these aside.
Alright, once we have a little simmer going on,
I'll remove this from the heat. And then we'll pour the hot cream evenly over the chocolate.
And now we'll cover this with foil. And we're going to let this sit undisturbed for five minutes.
After five minutes, you can uncover our chocolate,
and we're going to whisk this until it's nice and smooth.
The mixture will look like it wants to separate at first,
but everything should come together nicely. And then to make this a little extra rich and flavorful,
I like to take two tablespoons of softened butter.
This is unsalted butter. And I'll add an eighth teaspoon of salt
and a half teaspoon of vanilla extract
and we'll whisk this in until the butter is nicely melted and the ingredients are nice and smooth.
Now, let's set this aside to cool. We want this to be nice
and firm before we can use it to pipe into our macarons.
So these have been sitting about twenty five minutes, and if I run my finger over them,
as you can see, they're not wet or sticky,
so these are ready to be baked. We are just going to bake one tray at a time in the center rack of
a three a twenty five degree Fahrenheit preheated oven.
They'll need to bake for ten minutes and you'll want to turn the baking sheet halfway through.
Now if you're not sure if yours are finished baking while they're in the oven,
you can very, very gently press on the surface of one.
It shouldn't sink down in on itself. It should hold pretty firm, as you can see here.
We're going to cool these completely on the baking sheet
before we fill them with our ganache filling,
and most likely your ganache still needs a little bit more time to set anyway.
So once the macrons have cooled, we can remove them from the parchment paper,
and I just gently peel them off,
and yours should come off nice and easily.
Okay, now we'll just pair off similarly sized macarons.
And I'm only going to fill a few of these for camera.
I do wanna show you what the inside one of these macarons looks like though.
I want you to see how nice and full they are. You can see they're nice and full.
One thing I really love about chocolate macarons is they are basically never hollow.
Now your ganache should be nicely firmed up by now.
And if not, wait until it is. Let me show you what this looks like.
It's very firm and fudgy. If it's too thin,
it's obviously just going to run right off your macarons,
so make sure yours is nicely thickened. You can pop this in the fridge to speed up the process some,
but make sure you stir it periodically. I’m just going to drop this in a piping bag.
And I'm sorry if you're picking up any extra background noise.
Luke is enjoying a cookie behind camera over there.
Now, I did not put a piping bag in this tip.
I'm just going to snip off the end because it's a disposable piping tip,
but a wilton twelve or another smaller round tip would work well for this.
Probably cut that hole little bit too big. No worries.
And that is how you make chocolate macarons.
I really hope you guys enjoy today's recipe. And if you try this one,
please leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
I always love hearing from you. Thank you so much for watching,
and I'll see you next time. Ready to try one?
Yeah. Cheers.
How is it? Yum. Is it good? Yeah.
Is it better than the chocolate chip cookie? Uh-huh.
Like in the background, the cat and dog are going nuts over there,
and I'm like, don't look at them.
I always get so nervous in front of the camera.
Why am I like this?
So adding our meringue slowly is—so adding—
We'll go ahead and bang—*beep* *beep* *beep*
I know. I was like, maybe I'll just try it.