2. 150g icing sugar
3. 55g egg whites + another 55g eggs whites (yes, actually measure them by weight.)
4. 150g caster sugar
5. 50g water (yes, again measured by weight)
Method
1. In a food processor, pour in the ground almond and icing sugar, if using cocoa powder for chocolate macarons, you can use about 15g cocoa powder and put it in the food processor as well.
2. Pulse all the ingredients for about a min or 2. Then sift these ingredients, you really want very very fine grains. Even after pulsing, there were still some fairly big pieces of almonds. So you really want to sift them finely.. This takes some time...
3. Once you have your fine dry mixture, pour in 55g of egg whites to this dry mix, and mix thoroughly until it forms like a sandy paste.
Next...
4. In a saucepan, pour in water and caster sugar. Let it boil over medium low heat until it bubbles.. if you have a candy thermometer, you can wait till its about 125C then turn off the heat, I do not have one, so I just drip some of the sugar into a glass of room temp water, if the sugar forms a ball (called soft ball stage), its ready.
5. While the sugar and water boils, pour in the other 55g of egg whites into your stand mixer or using a hand mixer, whisk the egg whites with just a pinch of sugar, whisk till soft peaks form.
6. When the sugar syrup is ready, pour in the sugar syrup to the soft peaks egg whites and whisk. The bowl should be hot and you want to whisk until the sides of the bowl comes to room temperature.
7. By the time, the bowl comes to room temperature, it would have reached its stiff peak stage. If you want to add colouring, the colouring can be added here. Use gel colouring instead of liquid or paste.
**For the chocolate macarons, I did not add any colouring coz there was cocoa powder in the dry mix; but i added pink gel colouring at stage 7 when i was doing the strawberry macarons.
8. Once your meringue is done, add the meringue mix to the almond, icing, egg white paste.. mix and mix and mix... to test if the mixture is ready, drop some onto a place, if the peak falls within 20 secs, its ready, if the peak doesn't fall, keep mixing and check again.
9. Put the mixture into a pipping bag and pipe onto baking paper.. essential to use baking paper, no wax paper or greasing the pan...
10. Once all are piped, really bang the tray on the counter a few times to burst any air bubbles.
11. Important, let the cookies sit and rest for at least 30 to 40 mins.. While, they are resting, preheat oven to 160c.
12. Before baking these cookies, check them, there should be a skin formed on the top.. the top and sides should not be tacky or sticky..
13. Put them in the oven and bring down the temp to 150c, bake for 8 mins. After 8mins, open your oven door for about a second, close it and let them bake for another 8 mins.
