99 Macarons for Wing & Kate Wedding Party

90 grams, 30 grams, 110 grams, 200 grams. Repeat. 90 grams, 30 grams, 110 grams, 200 grams. Repeat. 90 grams, 30 grams, 110 grams, 200 grams. Repeat. 90 grams, 30 grams, 110 grams, 200 grams. Repeat. 90 grams, 30 grams, 110… …

That was my mantra for the last three weeks.

That’s the measurements for the four core ingredients to make macaron – 90 grams of egg white, 30 grams of caster sugar, 110 grams of almond meal and finally 200 grams of icing sugar. A fool-proof recipe from Tartelette’s blog that I’ve learned by heart over the last three weeks. Why? Even myself surprised at how overconfident I am sometimes, because I just promised my friends to make them 99 macarons for their wedding dinner party! Because the phonetic sound of “99″ is similar to the word “forever” in Chinese.

First of all, congratulations to my friends, The Department and Wingdingo for tying the knot just a little over a month ago at the Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas. And thank you so much for having me at the wedding dinner party last weekend, I had an absolute ball! And I can’t believe how we all met through Flickr back in 2005 while we were still strangers. Time flies…

Secondly, I must thank Linda from Eat, Show & Tell for her support and advice while I was struggling with my macarons. After my beginner’s luck, it all went down hill and I hadn’t been able to master it since.  After four attempts on making the macarons and they still came out look nothing like it but instead clumps of gooey chewy sugar, not to mention the wedding is only 5 days away, at that point I started to panic and I knew is time to call for help. Linda kindly sent me a very long email with all her tips with the first line in the email,

“Hi, Billy, I’ll give you as many tips I got from my 12 failures.” Yes, she was that obsessed. And yes, she is my sifoo of macarons.

“Wax on…. wax off…. wax on…. wax off….” I slowly get the hang of it.

After 5 attempts of failure, almost given up hope and ate way too much chewy shells; I finally cracked the macaron code. To see a tray of beautiful macaron shells came out of the oven has definitely gained my confident back. From then onwards, I was in full force and churned up four different flavoured macarons for the wedding. With 99 macarons as the target, I actually made over a hundred.

I found the secret of making macaron is to understand your oven. Every oven is different and has its own temperament, I’ve tried many different temperature settings at different cooking timings, each time it gave me different results. Most recipes advised to set the oven at 120C and cook for 10-15mins, my macarons came out fine but then started to shrink and wrinkly on the cooling rack. I studied my oven like it is a mystic relic, I realised my oven is obviously not as hot as others, and I also found the left corner is the hottest spot as the left macaron always first to rise and always first to turn brown. Eventually I settled on 130C at 20mins.

Let’s skip those boring techincal stuff, the nightmare is over. The fun part of making macarons is to come up with all different kinds of colours and flavours. That’s when you can let your mind goes wild! The four different flavours I’ve made are:

Elvis – Inspired by Elvis’ Fool’s Gold, this is the first flavour that I knew I have to make to celebrate the Elvis themed wedding. The “Elvis” macaron is comprised of peanut butter cream, strawberry jam and bacon chips. During trial period, I used the peanut butter straight out of the jar and spread on the macaron shell, which I found too rich and sticky, the flavour of jam and bacon simply lost in the combo. Hence, I decided to incorporate the peanut butter into butter cream which turns out to be a perfect solution. The PB (peanut butter)  butter cream is light and airy, enhanced with a touch of sweetness from the butter cream, and you definitely can taste the fruity strawberry jam and the salty bacon chips on the shell.

Pina Colada – The second flavour that I thought of to welcome Summer here Down Under. The teal coloured shells are sprinkled with dessicated coconuts and inside is a combination of coconut butter cream and pineapple gelee. The Pina Colada macaron is the one with the most texturised mouth feel from the dessicated coconut and pineapple chunks compared to others. I perhaps used a little too much of the coconut in the recipe, as the pineapple flavour is very subtle and unnoticeable.

Salted Chocolate – By adding salt, it makes sweet, sweeter; it makes chocolate, even more chocolatey. Well, that’s the theory anyway, that’s why salt has been used in cake baking for centuries. The bright yellow salted chocolate macaron is my safest option, comprised of dark chocolate ganache and Himalayan cracked pink salt. It is chocolate, everybody likes chocolate! And it is also a whole lot easier to make chocolate ganache as filling instead of using butter cream.

Ispahan – (pronounced as Es-Fa-Han ?) A very last minute decision and churned up this last batch of pink ispahan macarons on the same day as the dinner party. It is wedding, it has to be pink. While the Elvis macaron is more a blokey macaron, this rose water butter cream with lychee gelee macaron definitely win a woman’s heart, and boy’s too.

Clockwise L to R: GrabYourFork's Camera mirror necklakce; vivid flowers bouquet on the table, love the milk tin as vase; kids having great fun drawing paper table spread with crayons; the balloons 3-tier wedding cake

I am stoked that the macarons were well received at the wedding party among all the chocolate dipped strawberries and the gorgeous balloon three layers wedding cake with different flavour on each layer of dark-choc & cherry ripe, white-choc & orange, and caramel. Simply irresistible.

I was talking to The Pom and Helen how I’ve never attended a formal wedding . You know, where everyone put on their best frocks and suits, the bride and groom walk down the aisle, exchanging vows and all… But then to think of it, who needs a formal wedding when I was surrounded by good friends and good food.

Congratulations to The Department and The Baldy Wingdingo once again, may your future filled with love, joy, happiness and full of deliciousness!

You can get the macaron recipe from my Si Foo Linda here.

Tagged as: 99 macarons, dinner party, elvis, ispahan, macaron, mt colah, pina colada, salted chocolate ganache, wedding, wedding party, wing and kate