Yesterday I wiped up a few “easy” white chocolate pecan pies, using a recipe from Chef Cat Cora, they definitely weren’t as easy as I thought they would be but I think they still look pretty darn good.

Okay, so last night I tired my hand at macaroon cookies. This was quite challenging for me because macaroons use a meringue base (whipped egg whites) and so many things can go wrong when trying to whip egg whites.

I looked at several macaroon recipes and came up with my own version of the french macaroon, a vanilla macaroon cookie.

Ingredients

2 cups ground blanched almonds
3 cups powered sugar
8 egg whites
1/3 cup water
1 cup granulated sugar
2 vanilla beans, seeded

I preheated the oven to 275 and lined some cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Using a hand mixer I whipped 3 egg whites – make sure there is no grease in the bowl because the eggs will not whip properly otherwise.

In a small sauce pan I put the water and the granulated sugar until it was melted. (Watch the sugar very carefully because you can not let it burn.)Then I added the sugar mixture to the 3 egg whites and whipped it until it was glossy and a little bit stiff (around 12-16 minutes).

In a bowl I put the ground almonds, powdered sugar, remaining egg whites and the vanilla bean seeds. You mix this until it looks like a paste.

Then I folded in the whipped egg mixture with the other bowl.

I used a piping bag or a spoon to put “blobs” of my batter onto the parchment paper and allowed the trays to set for approximately 10-15 minutes.

I put one tray at a time into the oven and set the timer for 6 minutes. Then I turned the tray and set the timer for another 6 minutes or until the cookies were ever so slightly browned and a crust had formed.

Raspberry Coulis
In a small sauce pan, I put approximately 2 cups of raspberries, 1/2 cup sugar and 1/4 cup water and let it simmer down until it was a thick mixture. Coulis often doesn’t include the seeds but I usually leave mine with the seeds – it’s similar to jam.

Lessons Learned

1 – next time I would grind the almonds into a thinner consistency
2 – my whipped mixture started to “deflate” I think because the kitchen was warm, and it lost some of it’s thickness
3 – whip my egg white mixture slightly longer
3 – the smaller cookies were harder to handle and often broke, the larger cookies were much easier to handle

So recently I’ve been doing a lot of baking for the GCWCC, a charitable campaign at my work, and I’ve been making mini cupcakes on Thursday nights for Fridays at work.

Tonight I’m going to really challenge myself and try making French Macaroons, these are gluten-free which is something I’ve been trying to accomodate.

I will be taking pictures and will post about the French Macaroon process.

Keep your fingers crossed for me!

So this week I’ve been busy but also not active, other than soccer on Monday and I think by now people know how that ended. I read on my friend Heidi’s blog about this granola she’s been making, using applesauce. I love granola and I love applesauce so I thought I would give it a go. The recipe was easy to follow and make.

So here is my first batch – I changed the recipe slightly based on what I had in the house. Read the rest of this entry »