By Special Request

For EM1’s birthday this year, she made a special request. She did not want a birthday cake like every other year of her life. This time, she wanted me to make Macarons.

“No sweat. Happy to do it,” I told her.

My initial thought was that Macarons are like fussy cookies. I have baked lots of cookies in my day, so this should be a piece of cake (if you’ll pardon the pun). After a little bit of research, I was quickly dissuaded of the idea that the little French sweets were anything like cookies. They are nothing like cookies. They may be flat and round, but the tricky bastards are only camouflaging themselves like an innocent cookie when in reality they are evil and do not belong in a normal human being’s kitchen.

Okay, maybe not actually evil, but the rest of my opinion stands.

My second thought was, instead of making them, I’ll just go out and buy some. It’ll be easier and I’ll just tell EM1 that I made them. Problem solved.

Until I started looking at prices.

Have you ever bought a Macaron? They are quite a bit more expensive than I expected, and since I had no desire to mortgage the house just to buy cookies (sorry … not cookies) I was back to square one. Only, I was actually further back than square one, since I now realized that this project might take a little more time and effort than I had originally planned.

Turned out, I was wrong about that assumption as well.

It took A LOT more time and effort than I originally planned.

I found a recipe online called “Basic French Macarons – perfect for beginners.” There are so many oxymorons in that statement I don’t even know where to start. The word “basic” should be nowhere in that sentence, and “perfect for beginners” is so misleading the author should be sued for libel.

There were only seven ingredients in the recipe, so in the beginning I thought I had a chance of creating something edible. The world is so full of horrible things that I should know better by now than to ever hope something will turn out the way it was promised. For such a small list of ingredients, there was an inordinate amount of sifting, separating, whisking, whipping, and folding.

I know what those words usually mean, but when applying them to baking I’m a little lost. In general, if I can’t do it with a bowl and a spoon, it just ain’t happening.

I suppose it might have helped if I had read the instructions the day before and had some idea of what I was doing before I started. The recipe called for room temperature butter and eggs. I keep both those items in the refrigerator, so the first step of making Macarons for me was “set butter and eggs on counter and go watch an hour of Netflix.”

That was the part of the baking experience that worked out okay. I had time to start season 5 of American Horror Story. Score one for the Chef!

Next, I pre-heated the oven and mixed my Macaron ingredients into the mixing bowl. The mixture came out like a lumpy green oatmeal. I am pretty sure that is not the desired texture, however I was not about wait another hour while I brought two more eggs up to room temperature. I was committed and already stuck in enemy territory.

I placed the oddly rigid mass into a piping bag and squirted out two dozen circles of batter on two baking sheets. Okay, if I’m being honest, I piped out two dozen ovals, triangles, and various blobs. You would think circles would be easy.

And you would be very, very wrong.

I read the next line in the recipe and it said, “let the Macarons sit out on the counter for up to a couple hours, until batter becomes stiff and rubbery.”

Crap.

I turned the oven back off and sat down to watch episode two of season five of American Horror Story. Baking had become an awful lot like binge watching television.

When the batter was ready, I turned the oven back on, waited for it to heat up (while watching more TV), then popped the first of the baking sheets in to cook for the recommended 17 to 20 minutes.

After which, I sat back down on the couch to finish watching episode 3.

Twenty-five minutes later, I pulled out my dark brown, crumbling Macarons from the smoking oven.

Cookie sheet number two went in, and this time, I paid more attention to the time. At the end of 17 minutes, I pulled out the oddly shaped, but properly baked, lumps of batter.

As they cooled, I made the filling. This turned out to be pretty straight forward. Butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla. Even I didn’t screw up that combination.

By the time I was finished baking EM1’s requested birthday treat, I had a plate with seven incredibly sad looking Macarons. But they were homemade, as promised, and they looked almost edible. Of course, I couldn’t try them out myself since there weren’t enough survivors for sampling. I can only hope they tasted better than they looked.

They probably didn’t.

It was a lot of work and I admit that initially I was a little bothered by EM1’s odd request for a birthday dessert. A cake would have been much easier and cheaper, not to mention I could have made it in half the time it took to make the Macarons.

I’m not mad at her, though. With only seven Macarons on the plate, EM1 ate them all on her own.

And I think that is punishment enough for anybody.

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