My neighborhood in DC has undergone significant transitions over the years, one of which was the loss of an outpost of Baltimore's famous Vaccaro's. When that shop shut down, I lost my local connect for cannoli, coconut macaroons, and, most distressing, amaretti.
For those who've never had them, amaretti are the MOST delicious cookie in the world. Crisp on the outside, soft in the middle, with a delicate but pronounced almond flavor and just the right level of sweetness, they cannot be beat.
I've been up in Baltimore twice in the past six months, once for business, once for fun, BOTH times in walking distance of Vaccaro's. So both times, I brought home two dozen amaretti. As I was savoring the last one, I realized: these cannot be that difficult to make. Looking up recipes confirmed it. Clearly, Food Lab: Amaretti was too small a topic.
Ah, but there is another famous cookie made with almond flour and egg whites: French macarons. Conveniently, my bestie is downsizing and recently gave me an all-macaron cookbook she'd picked up on a whim a few years ago. Now we have a worthy Food Lab topic!
The macaron concept is simple (what follows is adapted from Entertaining With Beth).
You will need the following special equipment: a highly accurate digital scale, a fine-mesh sieve, an electric mixer, a pastry bag with a plain round tip, rimless cookie sheet(s) and silpat(s)
Sift 120g very finely ground almond flour + 200g powdered sugar through a fine sieve into a bowl and set aside.
Whip the whites from three ROOM TEMPERATURE eggs until they start to foam, then add a pinch of salt, 50g of granulated sugar (that you can omit if you're finding your macarons too sweet), and 1/4 tsp cream of tartar (do NOT omit this - it's the secret ingredient to REALLY FLUFFY egg whites), and continue to whip them HARD for 8-10 minutes. You basically want the egg whites to end up the consistency of whipped cream, so you're going to need to use an electric mixer or a LOT of elbow grease - I recommend the mixer.
Combine the whipped egg white mixture with the dry ingredients mixture (I found it easier to pour the dry into the whipped eggs), stirring ~70 times with a rubber spatula, then pipe onto silpat-lined rimless cookie sheets. As Beth explains well in the link above, it's important to neither under- nor over-mix your batter. Flaws - cracked cookies, no "feet," cookies that spread out too far - are usually a result of mixing errors.
You can really pipe any size you choose. We went with piping roughly 1 inch diameter rounds, which gave us approximately 60 cookies per batch (so 30 once paired). I would think making them much smaller would be difficult, but you can certainly make them larger if you like.
Bang them on the counter hard a few times to settle any air bubbles, let them rest and set for 30-60 minutes (at which point you can pat down any little peaks you may have created in piping them out), then bake for 20 minutes at 300 degrees. The resting time is also important for the formation of their distinctive "feet." Don't short it.
Once the cookies are cool, take them off the silpat and make little sandwiches by piping on buttercream filling.
We tested the silpat versus a single-tasker macaron mat versus parchment paper. Go with the silpat. The single-tasker is now in the garbage where it belongs, and even the parchment paper sometimes didn't want to release the little buggers.
Basic buttercream: beat 1/2 stick (1/4 c.) room temperature unsalted butter, then slowly add in ~3/4 c. powdered sugar
Now, that all is going to give you a macaron, but it will be kind of dull. How do they make all those pretty colors and flavors you see at bakeries?
Well, the cookie colors are a result of adding food coloring to the eggs while you're whipping them (except in the case of chocolate cookies, which are the result of adding 10g of cocoa powder to the dry mix).
The cookie flavors (again, aside from chocolate) are a result of adding 1/2 tsp of the extract of your choice to the eggs while you're whipping them.
We chose to make vanilla (with extract), chocolate (with 10g cocoa powder), lemon (with extract and food coloring), rose (with rose flower water and food coloring), and coconut (with extract) cookies. We decorated the coconut cookies with a little sprinkle of flake coconut on top before baking (also so we could visually differentiate them from the vanilla cookies).
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| Chocolate, on parchment paper |
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| Rose (color from red food coloring), on my beloved silpat |
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| Vanilla, on the damn single-tasker, to which several of the cookies stuck |
You can, of course, also flavor and color your buttercream. In fact, if you flavor your buttercream, you *should* color it so you can identify what's what.
We made the following icings:
- Hazelnut (adding about 1/8 c. very finely ground nuts)
- Macadamia (same)
- Orange (adding about a tsp. of orange extract and food coloring)
- Cherry (adding 1 oz. Ginja Licor - a Portuguese sour cherry brandy - and food coloring)
- Coffee whiskey (adding 1 oz. bourbon and espresso powder to taste)
- Passionfruit (adding about 2 oz. passionfruit puree and food coloring)
- Rose (adding about 1 oz. rose flower water and food coloring)
- Chocolate (adding about 2 tsp. cocoa powder)
(We went a little nuts)
We were able to incorporate the nut pastes and cocoa powder without having to put the buttercream back in the mixer. Any time you're trying to incorporate any sort of liquid, don't try to do it by hand - it's a pain in the ass and takes forever. Also, if you add liquid, you're going to need to add a bit more powdered sugar as well. I can't tell you how much - you just have to watch the consistency and add until it's right.
We ended up with the following combinations
- Chocolate hazelnut
- Chocolate orange
- Vanilla cherry
- Vanilla coffee whiskey
- Rose rose
- Rose chocolate
- Rose cherry
- Lemon passionfruit
- Coconut macadamia
- Coconut chocolate
We ended up with a total of about 150 macarons. Which, I'll admit, is a lot.
The universally esteemed winning combinations were:
- Lemon passionfruit
- Rose cherry
- Coconut macadamia
- Chocolate hazelnut
You can eat them right away, but they're better if you give them a little time for the filling to meld with the cookie. Store them in the fridge to keep your buttercream firm (but remember to let them warm up before you eat them), or, if you'll be storing them for more than a few days, freeze them.
What about the cookies that inspired this whole thing in the first place? Did I even make amaretti?
I did, right at the end. As I mentioned, they are dead simple to make (adapted from the recipe at Love & Olive Oil):
Combine 2 1/4 c. almond flour, 1 c. granulated sugar and 1/2 tsp salt in a bowl
Whip the whites from two ROOM TEMPERATURE eggs until they start to foam, then add a pinch of salt, 1/4 tsp. cream of tartar, and 1/2 tsp. almond extract and continue whipping the mixture to soft peak stage (4-5 minutes)
Mix the whipped egg whites into the dry ingredients with a rubber spatula. No need to be gentle - in fact, I ended up basically kneading the dough at the end.
Roll dough into 1 inch balls, roll the dough balls in powdered sugar, space about 1 inch apart on a silpat-lined cookie sheet, bake at 300 for 30-35 minutes. Makes about 2 1/2 dozen cookies.
These are really good cookies. Are they as good as Vaccaro's? No. The consistency is perfect, but I think the almond flavor needs to be stronger. The thing is, almond extract is pretty powerful stuff, so some initial caution is warranted.
All three recipes I found used 1/2 tsp. of almond extract, but one recipe used that for 3 1/2 c. almond flour, and the other used it for 1 c. almond flour, so I chose the midpoint of the three. And since we'd already made FIVE full batches of macaron batter and had to go back to the store TWICE for more powdered sugar, and I used the last of the almond flour for the one batch of amaretti I made, I wasn't about to put the rest of the crew through multiple rounds of amaretti as well. Also by this point, it was after 8 pm, we hadn't had dinner yet, and everyone was starting to get cranky.
Other options I've seen that I'll try in future test runs include:
1. Add the zest of one lemon to the dry ingredients (which I would think might enhance the almondyness of the almond extract)
2. Increase the almond extract to 1 tsp.
3. Keep the almond extract at 1/2 tsp. but also add 1/2 tsp. of Amaretto liqueur (this is probably where I'll start)
4. Use *bitter* almond extract (if you can find it)
Regardless, it looks like I'll be adding a new pantry staple: almond flour.
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