nothing in particular

My first experience with macarons was bad, it gave me an impression of 'lao hong' biscuits XDDD
So from then on, I thought "what's the hype about this silly biscuit? It's lousy."

But today we are doing macarons because of a fellow forummer/friend(VF). His purpose in attempting to bake is to present these macarons to his ♥. But there's one tricky thing here..none of us tasted macarons before -__-''' . According to VF, his ♥ is craving for macarons from this place called Canele. *later in the day, we each bought a macaron ($2.30 before GST for one pc!!!) from Canele and had a taste what most people call a GOOD MACARON*


We met up for lunch and VF bought some ingredients from Phoon huat after squeezing with all the aunties and uncles who were getting ingredients to make CNY goodies.
Ingredients includes eggs, almond (grounded), icing sugar, chocolate powder, castor sugar.

There are tons of recipes out there and we decided to adapt from one of them which was most detailed. But this turned out disastrous later. Anyway, we read of alot of failures from the blog's comments and we warned VF about it and prepared ourselves for failure @_@



Meanwhile, K measured the dry ingredients and instructed VF to mix them evenly..and I started separating the egg whites.


After all dry ingredients were evenly mixed, ground them to fine powder using the dry miller.


Being someone who has not baked before, that's the least VF can help out with.


Dry ingredients were ready so were the baking paper(cut to fit tray) and spatula(dried). Now its time to whisk the egg whites. According to instructions, whisk egg white to foamy and mix in dry ingredients, BUT another piece of paper/recipe says castor sugar is to be added to the egg whites. Confusion occurred in the midst of whisking the egg whites and we had to abandon whatever we were doing to check up the website for amount of castor sugar to add.

We returned to the egg whites shortly but they had started to separate O_O so we had no choice but to throw in sugar in and see what can be salvaged. The egg whites were whisked to near stiff peak and I folded the dry ingredients(chocolate powder, icing sugar and almond powder) into the egg whites.


VF piping the macarons..one has to put in effort to please his ♥ =D


Both of them piped BIG macarons -.-' its supposed to be 1" diameter actually.



The oven was preheated to 170 degrees and we threw in the first tray. They looked fine initially but...


They cracked like nobody's business after 8mins or so..which means either the batter was not dried enough OR the batter was overmixed or smth..so we had CHEWY SWEET ALMOND COOKIES.



The second batch had less cracks and it had "SOME FEET" but a far cry from a real macaron.



Side view of the few pieces of macarons with feet.
After trying those from Canele, we decided we will attempt macarons till we get the SAME QUALITY as theirs. RAWR~~