More adventures of macaron mishaps. For those that haven’t been following along, I decided to learn how to make macarons and it’s not going as planned. Let me tell you, I failed the “no fail, guarantee!” recipes. So I started documenting my progress. Coming over from lesson seven, I have decided to begin today by adjusting the temperature lower this time.

I went down to 275F (135C) as some of the overseas recipes suggested and baked for a long time. Two things happened: I over-mixed the batter and they spread out to be huge cookies. And they took forever to cook and stuck to the pan even after 40 minutes. No hollows, though as they were so flat they didn’t have room for them. I have to laugh at myself.

Let’s regroup a minute. I learned that at a higher temperature and with proper ratios, I had very little hollows. But they were crunchy and brown on the bottom. When adjusting the temperature lower by 50° I had to bake them nearly twice as long, but they were also over mixed. I could stay at this temperature and redo the batter. But let’s face it, I am not too confident yet to wait another 40 minutes to see yet more failed attempts. Perhaps the 50° variance was just a little too adventurous for me.

As a result, I decided to go higher in temperature, back to 300F (150C.) Let’s split the difference, shall we? Check out what happens next.