These chocolate macaroons should really have been called macarons. But this was way before my French was any good. And before I had travelled often to France where we enjoy different flavours of these every day.
According to Larousse Gastronomique, a macaroon is a small round, biscuit, crunchy outside and soft inside, made with ground almonds, sugar and egg whites. Macaroons are sometimes flavoured with coffee, chocolate, nuts or fruit and then joined together in pairs.
Chocolate Macaroons
Ingredients
- 480 g icing sugar
- 280 g ground almonds
- 40 g cocoa powder
- 7 egg whites
- 1.25 mls food colouring powder, I made different colour batches
Method
- Preheat the oven to 150° Celsius
- stack 2 baking sheets of the same size one on top of the other to prevent the undersides from becoming too brown
- line the top one with parchment paper
- sift together the icing sugar, almonds and cocoa powder
- whisk the egg whites very stiffly in a large bowl
- immediately quickly sprinkle over the sifted ingredients and fold in working from the middle to the outside of the bowl (I delayed this a bit and I think it affected my consistency - was too busy watching the Athlone towers come down)
- add food colouring
- pour the mixture into a piping bag and pipe the macaroons using the macaroon template
cooks note: I made a double level when piping
- leave to rest for 15 minutes
- bake for 12 minutes, leaving the oven door slightly ajar
cooks note: I have an LG Solardom oven which does not work with the door open, but they worked perfectly
- take them out the oven, lift a corner of the parchment paper and pour a little water onto the baking sheet
- remove and allow to cool completely before filling with ganache, cream or even jam
Click on the links for conversions and notes.
Ingredients for my Chocolate Macaroons:
- Icing sugar – make your own by blitzing 450g white sugar with 10mls cornflour
- Ground almonds – I use almond flour when a recipe calls for ground almonds. You can grind your own at home, just be sure to add the sugar to the blender with your whole almonds otherwise you will end up with nut butter.
- Cocoa Powder – be sure to buy the most expensive you can afford, and one that is 100% cocoa powder and does not have fillers.
- Eggs – In South Africa extra-large eggs weigh between 59g and 66g. I use free range eggs, and always in this weight range. When separating my eggs I do them one at a time. This way I never end up with egg yolk in the whites. If I am not using the egg whites for the recipe I store them in the freezer in bags. Be sure to write on the bag how many egg whites are in each one. Defrost your egg whites in the fridge overnight.
- Food colouring – I only use gel or powder, which is concentrated and adds nothing else but colour to my recipes. I prefer the powder for egg white based recipes, and gel for anything else baked.
Well done, and kind of fitting that you made ‘twin’ biscuits as the Athlone twins fell 🙂
yup, but now I have two lock n go containers of these things!
Now if only I lived closed to you…Those 2 containers would be reduced to zero very quickly. I think I read you can freeze them?
that would help!