With approximately 2lbs. stockpile of pistachios on hand, making pistachio macarons was my next agenda. I've made these before; while they turned out tasty, they were a little too soft and the color too pale to be called "pistachio".
For these, I used the recipe from Advanced Baking & Pastry textbook. I've been using my own recipe (adapted from Martha Stewart's. Hers had the most bizzare instructions) which worked pretty well, but always resulted in hollow shells.
Yes, I have a confession to make: I've yet to make the perfect macarons that are not hollow. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong either. Anyway, I just went ahead with the recipe, substituting about half of the almond flour with ground pistachios.
I folded in the almond-pistachio flour + powdered sugar mixture into the whipped meringue. There was this nagging feeling I may have overwhipped the egg whites a tad bit, but the resulting mixture looked fine, except they still looked a bit pale. I piped them out, let them rest, and baked them...
It's just so cool to watch how the feet develop on macarons!
Well, they look gorgeous on the outside...
For the filling: Cardamom-spiced Pistachio buttercream and Morello cherry jam.
So how were they?
DELICIOUS. Even my Mom, who hasn't been feeling too well this past week (due to extremely unstable weather and temperature) and had very little appetite, pronounced them divine.
Unfortunately they were all hollow. I recently found Chef Eddy VanDamme's blog (he's one of the psatry chefs who wrote the On Baking textbook that we've been using at school), and he said that the On Baking recipe is excellent. I shall try this recipe next time...
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