Florek bought me a book by Michel  Roux called “Eggs”, a nice little book that changes my idea of what a good crepe should be, how to posh up scrambled eggs, a few good desserts that I’ll surely try etc.  And a recipe for macaroons,  which was about a quarter of the length of the one I normally use. I read it with disbelief, I thought it was far too simple; no Italian meringue, an ordinary one instead. No drying time. No weighing egg whites. But for scientific purposes I had to give it a go, especially having some leftover blackcurrant curd. So I did. It was a refreshing method, but I’ll be sticking with more fancy Italian meringue. It seems to make the mixture a lot more stable and the texture of a ready macaroon thicker, more enjoyable to eat. Not to mention that the absolute majority of them cracked in the oven, while with another method it’s a sad few that do it.  Having said that, we’ve just had 5 between us with Izzie, who now says “more cake please”, so they will certainly not go to waste.

I used 180 g of icing sugar, 100 g of ground almonds, 3 egg whites which I whipped with 40 g of sugar, added food colouring and that was all.  Piped them onto the trays and shoved into the oven warmed up to 160 degrees. Michel recommends baking them for 7 minutes, mine were not baked after 7 minutes, mine took about 11.

Nice little experiment, but next time back to fancy stuff. 🙂