Project Overview
The nature of this project addressed making macaroons, thin, French meringue cookies that are sandwiched together with a cream filling. At first, I had a lot of overall concerns about this project, the main one being that prior to this, I had no experience whatsoever with baking, and I had heard from many of my peers that making macaroons is a rather difficult task, even for people who are more familiar with this sort of work. It is often said that the process for making macaroon is very precise, and if even one or two things are done in a specific way, it could ruin the entire process. I started out by simply searching for macaron recipes, and upon coming across a popular one, there were many people in the comments saying that another recipe was also very good, so that’s how I eventually branched out and found more recipes and tutorials on how to make macaroons.
Problems Encountered Along the Way
As I blindly began this project, with only the research I’ve done prior and a multitude of complex video tutorials under my belt, the first problem that I encountered was making the dough. Throughout all of the tutorials and recipes that I found, all of them emphasized that you had to wait around 30 minutes until the dough was firm to the touch before putting it into the oven. I had waited almost an hour, and my dough didn’t seem to be the way that all of the recipes said it should be. I ended up baking multiple batches from the same dough, and as I went about doing this, I found more success with the later batches, perhaps due to it having more time to solidify.
Another problem that I encountered was that the dough was sticking to the pan after I had baked it. I tried different things such as waiting longer for the macaroons to cool down before taking them off the pan, and even making a new batch with a thin coat of butter on it to prevent sticking, and I found that simply giving it more time to cool off worked best. When I added the butter, it made the macaroons expands a lot more during the baking process, causing them to all get stuck together. After about three failed batches, I finally was able to make a decent batch that didn’t fall apart when I tried to take it out of the pan.
Guides and Tutorials
There are lots of guides and tutorials out there, and I ended up using the recipe from Tasty, as well as the video tutorial that is paired with it. I also used other recipes and tutorials from Preppy Kitchen and Food Network to make sure that all of the steps that I were performing were consistent and reliable, and they all checked out with each other for the most part, with each different recipe having slight variations that were mainly decided by personal preference, such as food coloring or what kind of filling you wanted. The Tasty recipe was very particular on how to process and create the dough, while the recipe from Preppy Kitchen really helped me with the post baking process. The recipe from the Food Network was very specific about adding the final touches to the macaroons to make them more visually appealing with color and such. All of these sources were most likely created for people who have little to no experience with making macaroons, as the instructions are for the most part as simple as it can be with such a complex product, and they tend to keep things as simple as possible. I found all of these sources to be credible because they all had comments and reviews from people who have tried out their recipes and a lot of the comments were very positive saying how much it helped them to successfully bake macaroons. I would have to say that the video tutorials were the most helpful, as it showed me how to do certain tasks when there was any amount of uncertainty in the written instructions.
Reflecting On My Experiences As a Learner
As for myself, I could consider myself to be someone who learn better through hands on experience, which is why it makes sense that It took me more than a few tries before I was finally able to get it right. I had to constantly go back to the video tutorials for a strong frame of reference, and it took me a few tries each time to get the steps to seem right, like how they were done in the videos. I have played sports growing up and still play tennis today, so I am very familiar with working on things hands on, and solving problems through trial and error. Much like with sports, you try different things to help you to become better and win. Sometimes, you fail and you have to learn new things, adjust your strategy or rethink your approach until you find something that works. Baking these macaroons was a very similar process for me. I went through trial and error until I found a combination of things that ended up working for me, such as giving the dough more time to set, and making smaller dollops of dough, to minimize the risk of the macaroon cracking when trying to remove it from the pan after it has been baked.
How Does This Connect to Class?
I think that the main reason for this assignment was to get us out of our comfort zones. In a world that is so heavily dependent on technology that is constantly changing and adapting, always become more advanced, it is essential for us to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. We need to be more well rounded individuals in order to better adapt to our constantly changing environment. I enjoyed this project and I don’t think I would have done anything like this any time soon if this project didn’t exist, so I am grateful that it was able to open my mind a little bit and help me to try something new.
Citations
The most useful source that I had was the recipe titled “How to Make Macarons” from Tasty, written by Jody Tixier and Alexis Deboschnek. It was this recipe where I used the proportions of ingredients, and often referred to the instructional video that is provided with it as a reference
Another source that I used was “Macaron Recipe” which is a blog titled “Preppy Kitchen”, run by John Kannel. He has a very in depth recipe and it really helped me with a lot of the work that went down after the baking process, including making the cream filling for the macaroons. He also has an instructional video to pair with his written instructions.
The last source I used was from The Food Network, titled “French Macarons” by Food Network Magazine. This was a very short, and concise recipe, and it really helped me to get a strong general understand of the task that I was facing.
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