First, Macaroons

Having had some great macaroons in various flavors from Miette at the San Francisco Ferry Building, we were both excited and intimidated at the thought of making these seemingly too-delicate french cookies. Splendid Table's Lynne Rossetto Kaspar had Dorie Greenspan on her show recently, and Dorie described the process in a way that sounded doable and fun. Also, I've been missing my friend Amber who recently moved to San Francisco; she turned me on to the macaroons at Miette. These macaroons are dedicated to her (if it's possible to dedicate baked goods!).

Han and I intended to start our food blog for some time now and I wanted to kick it off with something new, something we've never tried. We've been eating more vegetarian fare lately, trying to do our part to live more sustainably. Since we're new to vegetarian cuisine, I suspect we'll be blogging about some of our finds. I'm loving the Moosewood Low Fat Cookbook now and just borrowed a copy of Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.

We wanted something easy, a recipe that didn't create TONS of cookies and we couldn't find blanched almonds, so we used the hazelnut mocha macaroon recipe from the foodnetwork. Our first problem was peeling the hazelnuts, which we did following Joe Pastry's method. It worked pretty well!

We used ghiradelli cocoa powder and hazelnuts from R. Field. Han tasted the nut mixture and said it was pretty awesome as is. We did strain the mixture but had to force the larger bits of chocolate and sugar through the sieve.



The egg white mixture came together very quick with my kitchenaid, faster than 2 minutes. I was worried that they were too stiff.

I don't have a pastry bag and tips so I used a large ziploc bag with the corner cut out. Not exactly elegant, but saved me the trip to a cooking supply store. It was pretty easy to make the cookies this way, although some were not perfectly round. Perhaps with practice, I'll get better.



I didn't realize that the cookies would not spread in baking. I put them too far apart and could not get them to fit on the pans. I had to keep some of the dough in the bag too long and the
subsequent batch came out flatter and more cracked. (The photo below shows our good batch!)



I'm not a huge fan of coffee flavoring in desserts, so we left out the espresso powder. I actually think the recipe would be great with it. The hazelnut flavor would be enhanced. Also, we ended up buying whipping cream instead of heavy cream for the ganache so the filling came out a little more soupy than I was expecting. We used Valrhona chocolate, 61%, not the fancy stuff.

We were still able to fill the cookies and Dorie's recipe on the Splendid Table website says to refrigerate overnight so we'll see if the cookies are more set tomorrow. Of course we had to have a few tastes tonight and they are great. We love our first macaroons. We're excited to try different flavors, different nuts. Tonight, I added some peanut butter to the ganache and created a few special ones for Han since he's such a chocolate peanut butter fan. Check it out, a few of our macaroons looked as beautiful as the Miette ones!