It has been a couple of days since I have posted, so here's one for today. The topic today shall be....MACARONS (or macaroons). There has often been a confusion between macaroons and macarons, so my aim here is to try and smooth out the 'kinks'. Macaroon (two O's) has a thick chocolate centre (often white chocolate, or sometimes, almost a cake-like centre) with roasted coconut shreds surrounding the outside (as pictured below).
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| Macaroons (notice 2 O's) |
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| Macarons (notice 1 O) |
Macaron on the other hand is a baked, sweet confectionery consisting of egg whites, LOTS of sugar, and ground almond, with the combination resulting in a heavenly delightful confectionery (which is likely to give you diabetes!). The appearance of these pieces are characterised with the smooth dome top, and 2 pieces are often sandwiched together with either jam, ganache or buttercream filling. These days however, macaron and macaroon are taken by most individuals as synonyms (and differentiated only when saying...'No, I'm not talking about macaron, I am talking about the COCONUT "macaroons"!') I've included a picture of macarons above to show you the difference.
Well this article would not be complete without a review. On Monday, an awesome colleague (fine...friend - I hope LK doesn't read this =P) brought in a box of 4 macarons for me from Aviary (as pictured below). If I was to be extremely critical about them, I would be making comments about the presentation of the macarons - observe the picture below closely and you can see that the macarons do not have a 'clean' finish; by this I mean that there were bits and pieces on the individual macarons that shouldn't be there, but that is me being extremely picky. The flavours were rather nice and sharp; the raspberry macaron was a bit of a surprise as the raspberry jam was placed in the centre (unexpected burst of flavour). I think my absolute favourite one out of the lot is the red looking macaron, which I believe is a 'cherry-ripe macaron'; it has very small pieces of desiccated coconut, with the layer of dark chocolate in the middle, sandwiched between the two light 'air-meringue-biscuits'.
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| Clockwise starting from left: mint macaron, salted caramel macaron, raspberry and chocolate macaron, cherry-ripe macaron |
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| Enjoying macarons - best enjoyed with hot tea/coffee |
If you haven't tried a macaron yet, I would suggest that you try and obtain some from your nearest patisserie or dessert cafe - to be administered orally stat.
Alternatively, you could try and make them (if you are interested in a challenge or know someone else that can make them - the most challenging step is the beating of egg whites and the number of times which you 'fold' the egg white, so be careful!).
Feel free to leave comments about macarons or macaroons (favourite flavours perhaps?).
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