Stick a Feather in Your Cap and Call it Macaroonie!
Monday, July 18, 2005 14:07
Well, with all the fuss in LA’s food world, more specifically in the bakery world, on macarons, those tiny pastel colored cookies made from almonds, sometimes filled with cream or chocolate… I thought I’d go back to the original macaroon that I knew - the kind made from coconut.
With only four ingredients that are simply mixed together – a bag of unsweetened coconut flakes, a can of sweetened condensed milk, 2 egg whites, and a teaspoon of vanilla – coconut macaroons are incredibly easy to make. I feel like such a perpetrator when I say I baked them - as if they actually required some effort.
A little baby ice cream scoop is helpful helpful in making perfectly round macaroons that are uniform in size, but shaping them like *oooh, fancy word coming up* canelles with two large spoons works out just as well. Cheaper than running out to buy another kitchen tool! Of course, shaping them by hand would have been a sticky disaster of a mess to say the least. The gooey little things bake in a 325 oven for anywhere between 8 and 25 minutes – quite a large window of time to be “checking for doneness,� but these babies were roasty toasty after about 15 minutes. On the very last one that I scooped out of the mixing bowl, there was a little too much condensed milk, which ended up weeping out into a burnt caramel-y around the bottom edge. Oh well, the best thing about baking? Eating the mistakes :)
They’re great plain, but they’re even better when dipped in white chocolate!
By sarah (see more of her posts). You can find more of sarah's writing at her own website The Delicious Life
Alice says:
July 18th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
I, too, love the macaroon. They’re so easy to make (even for those like me with no baking skills) and they taste better than kind you buy. My version is the chocolate-dipped variety. It’s too long to post in comments, but you can find it here.
Happy baking!
Alice says:
July 18th, 2005 at 3:11 pm
Ack! The link didn’t work. Here it is again:
http://www.alicepham.com/archives/2004/12/cheers.html
Jonah says:
July 18th, 2005 at 3:26 pm
Macroons are my favorite, I had no idea that they were as simple as that. We will see what happens when I try to make them though.
SoCalorie says:
July 18th, 2005 at 3:38 pm
Cook at home? Are you people crazy?
sarah says:
July 18th, 2005 at 3:45 pm
LOL!
i know…i used to cook almost every night.
and then i discovered how fun it is to explore restaurants. now i wish i could eat twice as many meals so i can cook AND eat out.
LOL!
cybele says:
July 18th, 2005 at 5:57 pm
If you can’t make your own (and they are super easy to make and you get to control how toasty yours are) - there’s a great little bakery over in Glendale on San Fernando called Lord de Pastry that makes only about four different cookies and one of them is a coconut cookie. They use ultrafine coconut but they’re not too sweet, practically melt in your mouth.
SoCalorie says:
July 18th, 2005 at 9:17 pm
Never been, will definitely try.