These Are Not The Macaroons You Are Looking For

Recently, I felt the sudden irrepressible urge to bake. It happens occasionally. I was low on supplies so flipping through my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, I settled on making coconut macaroons. Four ingredients: sugar, egg whites, vanilla extract and coconut all hung out in my kitchen, lazing around with bored expressions.

Macaroons are simple I thought, easy and won’t take up the whole afternoon. Oh how little did I realize that apparently macaroons are the high maintenance snobs of the cookie world!

The recipe read a bit like meringues but without the cream of tarter. Add sugar slowly and beat egg whites until stiff peaks form the recipe said. But it should actually have read: Add sugar if you want to and beat the egg whites forever until your arm loses feeling and falls off. Then get pissed off at the egg whites and add a teaspoon of cream of tarter to see if that helps any.

It didn’t help. The cream of tarter? Nope. Nothing. No stiff peaks at all. After about 40 minutes of beating, I finally walked away from the bowl afraid that my little hand held electric beater was going to resign. I came back a few minutes later, dumped in the coconut and told the batter to “get over it.”

The egg whites took their revenge on me though and while I was folding in the coconut, they fizzled, deflated and sunk.

“I am cooking you, stupid cookies!” I yelled at the bowl. This was personal now. The batter was just taunting me now. “I will bake you and eat you! I don’t care how you taste!”

These are macaroons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaroon

I don’t know what I made, but macaroons they are not.

Getting ready to go in the oven.



They came out more like a meringue stuffed with coconut then anything else. They might not have looked like macaroons, but, man were they tasty!