First thing to say: I hate Macarons. I hate preparing them, I hate baking them. I simply hate them. But there is a good reason for my hatred against Macarons – and it’s not the taste, they were always tasty and quite ok in that sense. The reason is:

They always look horrible. They are so, so, so difficult to bake and they are delicate divas. 

This is what I thought – until one very lazy sunday a few weeks ago when I tried to bake them one last time. I prepared for it by reading endless articles about how to bake them and by watching so many youtube videos made by chefs or bloggers. And I have to say: it really, really worked. I can’t believe it but my macarons where delicious AND (the most important thing right now!!) they looked the way they should look. They even had these little feet! Sure, I’m not 100% satisfied but I would say they are way better than my other tries…

How I brought them to look the way I wanted? Read it yourself:

• put the egg white out of the fridge a couple of minutes before you use it so that it gets room temperature – that’s really important otherwise the egg white doesn’t get stiff
• the egg white is never stiff enough – I never beat it enough, you really have to beat it for a long time (not just 2 minutes, I would say for about 10 minutes)
• use almound flour, not just ground almonds. I made always made this mistake at the beginning but even if you put the almonds in a mixer, they are never like flour.
• sieve EVERYTHING carefully. The sugar, the almond flour… – otherwise your Macarons will not rise and they have little pieces in the dough
• preheat the oven, you need it to be very hot when you put the Macarons into it
• follow the instructions on the recipe, don’t change ingredients/weights
• let the Macarons dry before you put them in the oven for about 30 minutes to 1 hour. When you carefully touch them, their surface has to feel like chewing gum 😉 (that’s the way it felt to me)
• the Macarons are finished when you can lift them from the baking parchment with a knife whitout the dough remaining on the baking parchment
• when you have the dough on the baking tray, hit the tray on a table so the air can get out of the dough – then there should be some bubbles in the dough: carefully stab them with a toothpick
• put a lot of food colour into the dough – while baking the Macarons loose colour and as you can see my pink macarons turned gold/brown
  
• most important: just be very careful, baking Macarons is worse than holding a newborn baby…

So this are the most important things I learned when baking Macarons. You have to make them dozens of times, it usually takes a lot of practice to make them look the way you want – but it is worth it. They look very beautiful and taste delicious and are in these ways perfect little presents. I hope I could help you, let me know if your Macarons worked!