Macaron Discipline

"What color did you make them?" We let them go naked. It's classier that way. Plus, food coloring is kind of expensive.

Jenn and I attempted making macarons a few weeks ago. Pain in the arse, but satisfying to produce such precious, adorable things. God, did I really just use those words?

The experience led me to conclude that: 1) You shouldn't try stiff-peaking egg whites by hand, even if you have man strength like i do. Get a mixer and spare yourself the embarrassment. 2) Macaron making is all about following rules, and wondering how the suckers would have turned out if you hadn't followed the rules, but being too chicken to not follow the rules. That said, I'm not going to post a recipe, there's plenty of contradicting recipes, step-by-step guides, folk-lore, fairy tales for macarons on the web already. Go confuse yourself. I'd rather just share with you some of the more irritating, rash-inducing, butt-sweat-producing rules that we felt we had to follow to make these mofos:

• Age the egg whites at room temperature overnight. If anyone else has experienced the dizzying, stifling stench of aged egg whites, especially after a hot summer night, holler.


• Sift the ground almond and confectioners sugar. I hate sifting anything.


• After piping the cookies into perfect circles, let them sit for an hour so they can develop "skins." After making macarons, you realize how disgusting they kind of are. Rotten egg whites, skins...


• Of course, measure everything, very exactly. If you're Chinese, there's something fun and novel about practicing your anality and crazy math skills when making cute French pastries, but it soon gets old and you realize the Chinese pretty much based their cuisine around eyeballing stuff, and it's worked for them for centuries; that having to measure things so exactly is masochistic and a little meaningless.

Making macarons is time consuming. Plan for it well; don't drink beer and try to have guests over at the same time. I left Jenn to tend to the macarons at midnight because I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to sleep. Poor girl was up until 1 or 2 in the morning making sure the babies went into the oven and came out at the right time. They were pretty tasty in the end. But were they worth the trouble? I dunno.