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About this
Recipe The holiday of Pesach is soon approaching, you know that
you’ll bid a temporary farewell to leavened breads and ingredients like
flour, baking powder, and baking soda–the building blocks of tasty sweets!
What’s a dessert-lover to do? |
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Servings: 20 macaroons Preparation: 30 minutes Cook time: 20 minutes |
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Macaroons
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Ingredients: 4
large egg whites, room temperature 1
¼ cups sugar 1
tsp salt 1
tbsp honey 2
½ cups shredded coconut ½
cup whole blanched almonds or ¼ cup almond flour 1
tsp vanilla extract 4
oz (about |
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Directions: 1.
The secret to making these macaroons
Passover-appropriate is using almond flour or almond meal instead of regular
wheat flour. If you have almond flour handy you can use that, but you can
also easily make your own by grinding fresh blanched almonds. So put your
almonds in a food processor high-speed blender…And process the nuts in short
bursts until they’re ground into a fine powder. Homemade almond flour isn’t
as fine as the kind you can buy, but for this recipe a little texture is no
problem at all. If you’ve made your own almond flour, measure out ¼ cup and
if you have any extra, set it aside to use in another recipe. 2.
Now combine that ¼ cup almond flour with the egg
whites, granulated sugar, salt, honey, coconut, and vanilla extract in a
medium-sized saucepan with a heavy bottom. 3.
Place the saucepan over medium-low heat and stir
until the egg whites moisten everything, the sugar melts, and you have a
gorgeous gloopy mess. 4.
Cook the macaroon mixture, stirring constantly so it
doesn’t scorch on the bottom of the pan. As the egg whites heat, it will look
creamy and almost foamy, as pictured above. We want to gently cook the whites
and cook off some of the liquid, so slowly heat and stir the macaroons for
about 5 to 7 minutes. 5.
As the macaroons cook, they’ll go from loose and
creamy to a texture that’s more sticky and gluey.
The whole mixture will start to hold together in more of a clump. It
shouldn’t reach a point where it gets dry, pasty, or crumbly. 6.
Once the macaroons are done cooking, scrape the
dough into a bowl and press a piece of cling wrap on top of it. It needs to
cool and set a bit before you can form and bake the cookies, so either let it
cool at room temperature for several hours, or put it in the refrigerator to speed
up the process. At this point, you can pause the process and chill the
well-wrapped dough for up to a week, or freeze it for up to two months. 7.
When you’re ready to bake, preheat the oven to 325
degrees Fahrenheit. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, and use a
cookie scoop or a tablespoon to form 15 to 20
cookies. They don’t spread at all, so you can place them close together on
the baking sheet. 8.
You can bake the cookies as they are, or if you want
to make the traditional “haystack” shape, wet your hands and pinch and press
each cookie into a triangle. Don’t make them too thin and pointy on top, or
the tops will get very dark before the rest of the cookies are done baking. 9.
Once all of your cookies are formed, bake them in
the preheated oven for 18 to 20 minutes, rotating them halfway through the
baking time so they bake evenly. When they’re finished, the macaroons will be
golden brown all over and have a crackly, glazed finish. 10.
Now, you can stop right here and have an awesome
Passover macaroon. Crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside, it’s
pretty much my idea of heaven. But why stop when there’s a bowl of chopped
chocolate we haven’t even gotten to yet? If you want to add a touch of
chocolate to your macaroons, let the cookies cool completely. Melt the
chopped semi-sweet chocolate and dip the bottoms of each cookie in the
chocolate, then place them back on the cooled baking sheet to set. |
