During spring break, my younger sister and I decided to make macarons together. We had been inspired by a few videos we had seen on Facebook, but mostly by our own bougie cravings. The recipe that we used is courtesy of the Tasty video “How to Make Macarons.”

The macarons pictured here are lemon-flavored with raspberry jam filling, however you can make yours any flavor you like by changing the extract part of the recipe and picking a different filling. Here is the ingredient list for 30 macarons:

Ingredients:

Powdered Sugar, 1 ¾ cup

Fine Almond Flour (we only had regular flour but we sifted it to make it more “fine”) 1 cup

Salt 1 teaspoon

Egg Whites 3 

Granulated Sugar ¼ cup

Extract (this is the flavor part so you can use vanilla, peppermint, lemon, etc.) ½ teaspoon

Food Coloring (if you’d like to make them a certain color) 2 drops

There are A TON of steps for macarons because it’s a very precise process, so it’s important to measure everything out and follow the rules, otherwise they’ll have issues. 

Directions:

1. In a bowl, combine the powdered sugar, flour and half of the salt and mix. You can use a food processor/mixer or a bowl if you are confident in your mixing abilities.

2. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites with the rest of the salt with a hand mixer until soft peaks form. Gradually add the sugar and then beat until hard peaks form.

3. Add the extract and food coloring and beat until incorporated.

4. Add the flour mixture gradually to the egg white mixture and fold slowly into the batter.

5. Transfer the batter into a piping bag and pipe the macarons onto a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. They should be about 1 ½ in diameter and 1 inch apart from each other.

6. Tap the baking sheet to get rid of any loose air bubbles.

7. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

8. The macarons need to sit for at least 30 minutes until dry to the touch.

9. Bake for 17 minutes. Do not open the door to check because this might mess them up. Use an oven light if you are curious as to what they are doing.

10. Transfer the macarons to a wire rack to cool.

11. Use a filling of your choice and sandwich two macarons together.

We had a lot of fun making these, even though it was a lot of work. In the end, they actually turned out pretty good despite the fact that it was our first time making them. The jam was very sweet and the lemon and raspberry flavors worked together well. The great thing about this type of cookie is that it’s super customizable and you can mix different fillings and extracts to create combinations that work for you.

The texture was slightly more dense than a professionally-made macaron, but considering we had a bit of trouble with incorporating the batter that result wasn’t particularly surprising. The only thing that we didn’t understand was why (as my mom first pointed out) they tasted a bit like Froot Loops!