All The Pieces Coming Together

After our disastrous macaron attempt last week, the elderchild and I tried again yesterday. It was almost disastrous again but we persevered and got pretty decent looking raspberry macarons!

Here's what worked, and what didn't:
1. The oven, new, is convection, and it seems that it should be set to 275˚F. 300˚F was too hot and they didn't develop their little feet.

2. The parchment, King Arthur brand, was perfect.

3. The egg whites were the near-catastrophe. I had egg whites in a carton which I'd used for a cake. After we tried to make meringue out of them for the macarons I recalled that they don't work well for that purpose (maybe there is a preservative or pasteurization issue? I don't remember). Anyway, we separated some eggs and made a better meringue which we used for the macarons. Not wanting to waste the other egg whites, later I beat the meringue for probably 20 minutes and made forgotten cookies. Which are not bad, after all that!

Forgotten cookies.

4. For the ganache, since I didn't have raspberry purée, I used raspberry syrup I had in my canning inventory. I added together the volumes of the purée and invert sugar and just used that total amount of raspberry syrup, and it worked perfectly.

I am now out of almond flour and don't anticipate buying any more in the near future as my freezers are both overflowing with food.