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- Coming up on the next episode of "Charlotte Cooks," we're making some French macarons.

(upbeat music) Welcome to this episode of "Charlotte Cooks."

I'm Chef Pamela Roberts, and I'm so glad you're here today.

I have a special guest, Kelly Dopkeen from The Humble Crumble up in Huntersville.

She has an online bakery, and she's going to be making some French macarons for us.

- Thank you for having me.

- Oh, I am so glad you're here.

- Thank you, me too.

- So a lot of people get intimidated by these, don't they?

- They do, they do, but they're actually a lot of fun, and I hope that by the end of today, everyone will be at home making them themselves.

- I hope so too.

So the first thing we have to do is really get our flour treated, right?

- Exactly, exactly.

Now, most bags of almond flour will say it's super fine on the bag.

It's still not fine enough for our macarons, so we have to put it in a food processor first.

So the first thing we're going to do is add our almond flour.

- Do you have to use a food processor for this?

- You could use a blender, but the food processor has a little more power to it, so you're gonna get a finer grit.

- So you do need some kind of a machine with some ooph to it?

- Yes, you do.

Then you're gonna add your confectioner sugar right in there as well, and this will make sure that we have a really even consistency with our sugar and our almond flour, and then I'm gonna pulse it.

- Okay, and the reason for pulsing is you're really just mixing it.

You're not really chopping it up, are you?

- Right, and we wanna make sure we're not getting an almond butter.

- Okay, good, oh, good point.

- All right, now before I move on, I just wanna make sure there wasn't any almond flour hiding in our creases, and then I'll give it one more pulse.

All right.

- You really just did just one more pulse.

- (chuckles) I did.

- Okay.

- All right, now we have to sift this, 'cause even though it comes super fine and we still put it through the food processor, we have to make sure we remove any leftover grits.

- [Pamela] And we're gonna use a wire mesh, or a sieve, or something like that?

- Yes, I'm going to start sifting, and you just wanna tap your sifter.

We don't wanna be forcing any of our almond flour or sugar through it.

You just wanna let it naturally sift, and then you can see that we have a little bit of these grits still left.

- Oh, we don't wanna smoosh those through.

- No, we don't want to, 'cause then you're gonna have like a gritty cookie.

We don't want that.

- We don't want gritty cookies.

- No.

- [Pamela] We don't want gritty macarons.

- No.

And then we're gonna do this two more times.

- Okay, so and each time you're gonna get something out of it maybe, huh?

- Probably, hopefully, each time it'll be a little less.

- See, there's another batch.

This is kinda like panning for gold.

- Yes.

One thing to be careful of, though, is you never want to remove more than 10% of your total weight.

- Because then you're gonna have to figure your ratios out again.

- Exactly.

- And baking is all about ratios.

You have to be exact in baking, don't you?

So is this the temptation to get a spatula and work that through, just shake it out.

- Exactly, and now that our flour and sugar is fully sifted and incorporated, we're just gonna leave this off to the side, and start preparing the rest of our ingredients.

So the next thing we want to do is prepare our vanilla bean.

For the vanilla macrons, I do like to use fresh vanilla bean.

You can use extract, though.

- And if you use the fresh bean, you get the little flecks in there.

- Exactly.

- They look pretty.

Yeah, so show us how we're gonna do that.

You're gonna take the bean?

- Yes, so I take the bean, and then I'm gonna take a paring knife, and I'm just going to slice it down.

- You're not cutting it all the way in half, are you?

Just opening it?

- Yes, exactly.

I'm just going to slice the first layer down, and then open it up.

- [Pamela] And all those little magic beans inside.

- [Kelly] Each one is so delicious.

- [Pamela] They really are, aren't they?

- [Kelly] And then I'm gonna take the back of my knife and scrape it out.

- And this is a half a vanilla be you have there?

- This is.

- Yeah, I see all those little beans on the end of the knife too, like ooh, ooh, ooh.

- Yep.

- Every one of 'em.

- And then I like to save my husks, make some little sugar, make vanilla sugar with it.

- [Pamela] Absolutely.

- It's delicious.

Don't throw these away.

- Don't throw them away.

You can actually, I make my own vanilla extract at home.

So when I have these, I just drop those back in the bottle, shake it up a little bit, and it just keeps a perpetual vanilla going.

It's beautiful.

- [Kelly] It's excellent.

- So the next thing we have to prepare is?

- All of our tools, so it's very important that you have all of your tools and ingredients ready to go.

You don't wanna make your dough and then be rushing around your kitchen for everything, because once it's ready, you gotta use it right away.

- And so tell us about the tools you need and the things that you can substitute.

Just tell us about what you're gonna be using.

- Well, the first thing you wanna do is make sure you have a measuring scale.

When you're measuring out for your ingredients, you don't wanna do it by volume, you want to do it by weight, 'cause everything has to be so exact, okay?

So I have my granulated sugar, my egg whites, and it's really important that your egg whites are at room temperature.

- And what about old or new?

- So old will be good, but new is just as good.

- So it doesn't matter, 'cause you hear so many wives tales sometimes about, oh the old egg whites make better meringue, old egg whites whip better.

Does that make any difference in your experience?

- I'm impatient, I just use the new ones.

(laughs) - Use whatever you've got, all right, good.

No yolks required?

- No yolks.

You actually really wanna make sure that you are not getting any yolks into your egg whites.

- [Pamela] That's where your fat is.

- Yes, yeah, and you're not gonna get that beautiful meringue and stiff peaks that we want.

And you wanna make sure that you're not artificially warming up your eggs, 'cause then you'll just start to cook 'em.

So don't microwave them.

Don't put them over any heat.

Just let them naturally come to room temperature over about an hour, hour and a half.

- All right, sounds perfect.

- Then I have cream of tartar, and that's what's gonna help our meringue come to that stiff peak and help stabilize our egg whites.

And then we have our piping bag and a medium large tip.

It's about a half inch size.

- But it's just a plain round tip.

It doesn't have any fluted or any kind of designs on it?

- No, you want a plain round?

- [Pamela] Do you have to have a tip?

- Yes, because if if you're just cutting your bag, your macarons won't rise properly.

They'll rise at an angle.

- Oh, that's no fun.

- No, no, we really want just nice even rises.

- Tell us about your trays.

- Yeah, so I prefer to use these trays with circles on them, and that's just gonna help to make sure that you're getting even sizes, and it can also help you if you wanna make a smaller or a larger size.

If you don't have this though, it is okay.

What you can actually do is print out from online circles, put it on your sheet, and then put parchment paper on top of it, and you can see they shine right through.

- And this is a really good little tip too, because you can make your circles as big as you want.

'Cause remember, you're sandwiching things together, and so it's really important you have the same size, because you don't want a big one on top of a little one, or a little one on top of a big one.

You want 'em to be the same size.

That's how you're gonna get that gorgeous uniform look.

- Now if you do this, once you make your macaronage, which is the dough.

- Oh, I like that word, macaronage.

- You will actually pipe just a little bit in the corners to help hold these down.

- [Pamela] Oh, good tip.

- If you're using a silicone mat, you don't need to do that.

It's heavy enough that it will stay down on its own.

- So for meringue, you're gonna show us not ready, not ready, not ready, ready.

- Exactly.

So we're gonna start by putting our room temperature egg whites into our bowl.

Then we're gonna start getting it a little frothy.

(food processor whirring) - So right now you're just trying to break them up?

- Yes, we're just mixing it, and you can see it's already starting to change.

We're getting some bubbles.

Some air is getting incorporated into there.

I'm just gonna add some cream of tartar in there.

- Cream of tartar is considered an acid.

I don't think most people think about cream of tartar as being an acid.

- Right.

- And if you didn't have cream of tartar at home, you could use a pinch of vinegar or a pinch of lemon juice?

- Exactly, and you're not gonna taste it.

- No.

- So it is okay.

- But the acid is really important for stabilizing the egg white so it doesn't just break down.

It stabilizes.

- Exactly.

- It's a nice thing to do.

- So I'm just gonna increase.

- There we go, look at all that volume starting to build.

This is gonna get quite big, isn't it?

- Yes.

- Big compared to what it is in the bottom.

(food processor whirring) - So now we've gotten to the soft peak stage.

- Show them what soft peak means, because there are different stages of all this.

- Yeah, so it kind of, it flops over a little bit.

We're not getting it very stiff.

So now I'm gonna start incorporating in my sugar.

And you wanna make sure that you add your sugar in a little at a time.

If we just dump it in, then our air is gonna deflate out of our meringue.

- Oh, that's a really good point.

And the whole point of whipping it like this is to get air into those egg whites so they get large, and if you put something heavy like sugar on top of it, just think about what would happen, deflation.

- If you wanted to use a flavored extract or a coloring, this is when you would add it in.

- Now, when you wanted to add colors, 'cause sometimes we go to the store, we buy macaroons from places, and we see really vibrant colors.

What kind of coloring do we use, 'cause it's not just all natural stuff, is it?

- No, you want to use a a gel based coloring, and those ones tend to be more vibrant.

You could also use a powdered coloring, but that's gonna come out more of a lighter color, more of a pastel, but if you want a really pop of color, you wanna use that gel, and really just a few drops of it.

It'll go a long way.

- And you don't wanna use liquid food coloring?

- No, 'cause you don't wanna be adding any more water.

- [Pamela] So gel or powder, gel for vibrant colors, powder for softer colors?

- Yes.

Okay, let's check our meringue.

Now, you don't want it to be too soft, and you also don't want it to be too stiff, because if you over whip your meringue, you're gonna get hollow shells once they bake.

- [Pamela] Yes.

- This is actually looking perfect, and you can see we have a nice peak there, and the ultimate test.

- Oh, no.

- Is if you can flip it upside down and it doesn't come out.

- Yay, we did it, okay.

- And now that our meringue is done, our next step is to make the macaronage, and that is when we incorporate our almond flour into this.

- And there's a way of doing that too, isn't there?

Everything is a step.

- [Kelly] I have our meringue, and I have our almond flour and confection sugar.

- Which one's going in what?

- I'm gonna start by adding a third of the almond flour into our meringue.

- So you put the flour into the meringue, not the meringue into the flour.

- Exactly.

- All right.

- And we just wanna start with a third of it.

- Do you need to be exact?

- You can eyeball that.

- Okay.

- So now I'm gonna fold this into our meringue, so I'm gonna start by cutting it down the center, and then folding it over.

- [Pamela] This is what they mean by folding.

- [Kelly] Yes.

- Everybody always says fold my pastry.

What am I doing, what, folding when you cook, what?

I'm not doing laundry, but there is a technique.

It's about not deflating the meringue, right?

- Exactly.

We just spent all that time making this beautiful meringue, so we wanna be a little gentle with it.

- [Pamela] Just like with the sugar, if you add it all at once or you'll plop it in on top, it is just gonna deflate the meringue.

- So now that it's almost all the way incorporated, I will add in or eyeball another third fold that in.

- [Pamela] It's a very gentle process.

- And I think this is the step that actually can trip some people up.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- Yes, you have to both, you can't over-mix it, and you can't under-mix it.

- [Pamela] That is the last bit.

- Add the remainder, and then at this point, I'm also gonna add in our vanilla beans.

Now I can fold our last bit in, and get those vanilla beans all distributed.

And you really wanna make sure that you're scraping the bottom of the bowl while you're doing this.

And now what we're actually gonna do is deflate some of our air pockets in there.

- Okay.

- So you do actually want to now scrape and slide around your bowl, and then pull it back into your mixture.

So to test to see if we are done, we wanna be able to get a nice smooth ribbon falling from our spatula.

So you can see right now it's just a big clump, so we know we're not ready yet, so we just have to keep smearing along the side of our bowl.

- So that's how we'd get it to, 'cause I know you held the bowl upside down and it didn't come out, and I'm like, now you're saying it's gonna ribbon off the spatula, and it was just solid just a minute ago, and you've added solids to it, and so here is the trick.

I'm getting it to ribbon off of the spatula by smearing it against the sides of the bowl.

- If you were to under-mix these, you're gonna get stiff little cookies, not those flat sandwich cookies that you want.

- [Pamela] We have our ribbon, all right.

- Now, once you get that ribbon in there, you wanna make sure it only takes about 10 seconds for it to start to incorporate back into the rest.

- [Kelly] Before it drops back into the bowl.

- Exactly, okay?

And now we're gonna be ready to put it in our pastry bag with our tip.

But one thing before we put it in that I wanted to show you is when you start piping, it's very important to hold your pastry bag exactly perpendicular.

If you go at an angle, you're not gonna get an even rise.

You're gonna get a lopsided rise.

Yeah, the process for it is you squeeze, stop squeezing, and then you do a little flick, okay?

(Pamela laughing) - You're gonna have to demo that for us.

You're gonna have to show us how you do that.

- All right, let's get this in.

I'm gonna twist my bag so I don't get anything leaking out.

And when you're filling this, you wanna make sure you're not getting getting air pockets in here, 'cause if you get the air pocket come through, it's gonna end up in your cookie.

- So how many macarons could you get out of this batch?

- So this right here would probably give you about seven to eight cookies.

- Okay, that's after they're sandwiched?

- Exactly, yeah, so however many you make, you end up with half the amount of cookies.

So I'm gonna hold it perpendicular, squeeze, stop squeezing, and do a flick.

- [Pamela] Oh, look at that little flick.

- Squeeze, stop, flick.

- [Pamela] That's cute.

- Squeeze, stop, flick.

- And that's gonna give you that nice top that you need.

How lovely, and so you can control the size of it by your squeeze.

You just don't go over there and (imitates crunch).

You just gently squeeze.

I like the flick.

(laughing) That would take a little practice, I think to perfect, huh?

- [Kelly] Yeah, but it's fun.

- Yeah, and I imagine you've made a few thousand macaroons.

Macaroons, macarons.

She doesn't make macaroons, she makes macarons.

(chuckles) - Then the last step is you just want to bang these on the table for a second.

- [Pamela] And the purpose for that is?

- It gets out any little air bubbles that might have snuck in, and it just kind of helps distribute the spread a little bit.

We wanna let these sit out for 40 minutes.

- And the purpose for that is?

- We wanna dry them out a little bit.

And what's going to happen is a film is gonna start to develop on top and depending on the humidity in your air, could be a little less than 40 minutes, could be a little more than 40 minutes.

So you really wanna look at it and see if you can rub your finger, kind of glide your finger over the top skin that's going to form.

- [Pamela] And if anything sticks, it's not ready.

- [Kelly] It's not ready.

- It's gotta be completely smooth.

Now, you're not pressing down when you do that.

You're just ever so slightly just rubbing it just to see if it's formed that film?

- Exactly.

- So do you do this in the refrigerator?

Do you do room temperature?

- No, you leave it out room temperature, and once that skin has formed, you want them to go right into the oven at 300 degrees.

So it's really good practice to at this point get your oven preheated, because once it's ready, you don't wanna then wait for your oven to preheat.

- Now we're gonna make a frosting, and you're making a lemon flavored frosting?

- I am.

- And we're using it as a filling for the macarons.

- Exactly, so just because we're making vanilla cookies, we can do a filling of all sorts of different types of fillings, frostings, jams.

So it can be really exciting, even though we're just making vanilla cookies.

I'm gonna start off by putting room temperature butter into our mixer.

So I'm using a paddle attachment on this.

And what this is going to do is really cream our butter, and at the same time it's gonna kind of scrape the sides of our bowl, yes.

- I like that paddle that has that little scraper blade on the edge.

- Exactly.

- [Pamela] And so this is just loosening up the butter right now, and you're going to add, wow, a lot of sugar.

(both laughing) - Yeah, a lot of sugar.

So I'm gonna start by slowly incorporating- - It's basically a buttercream.

- It is, yeah.

We're making American buttercream.

- [Pamela] How much butter do we have again?

- This is about 230 grams.

- Okay, and then how much sugar are we adding?

- [Kelly] Almost double the sugar.

- Double the sugar?

- Yeah.

- Okay, and we're using 10X sugar?

10X sugar, we call that in the industry 10X sugar.

At home, you guys would probably call it confectioner sugar, icing sugar, that kind of thing.

It's that sugar that's really fine with the corn starch in it.

The reason we use that is because we're not having the granulated sugar and waiting for it to melt.

And if we use the granulated sugar, we'd have a gritty icing rather than a nice smooth, lovely lemon flavored frosting.

- You can start to hear our mixer struggling a little bit as we thicken up our buttercream.

For our flavoring, we're using both lemon juice and lemon zest, and the majority of our flavor is actually going to come from that lemon zest.

- Absolutely, so you want that lemon zest really fine?

Did you put it on a microplane or how did you fit it?

- I used a microplane for it.

Put that in, and you can see that it's very thick.

So our lemon juice is actually going to thin it out a little bit.

So it is a good idea to do a little bit first, test out your thickness, and then you can add more.

- [Pamela] You don't want it to get too thin?

- [Kelly] No.

- Then you have to add more sugar.

(chuckles) - And now actually I'm gonna stop it for a second, scrape the bottom of the bowl, make sure everything is getting incorporated.

- That's one of the most important parts about baking is when you're making your mixes to go ahead and stop it and scrape your bowl down.

If you've ever made cookies at home, sometimes you lift it all up and you get it out, and there's a bunch of flour stuff left on the bottom of the bowl.

This helps prevent that, 'cause we measure it out.

We need it all in the mix, and so if you're leaving a big clump of it in the bottom of the bowl, there's something wrong with your mix.

It's not gonna work out the way you expect it to.

- All right, so now that we scraped the bottom of our bowl, we'll get it started again, (mixer whirring) and increase my speed a little bit as well.

You can see it's really smoothing out now.

- [Pamela] Oh, yes it is.

- You wanna make sure it's nice and smooth and pipeable.

I'm also gonna add just a pinch of kosher salt to that to help bring out our flavors.

- That'll be lovely.

I always think that a little bit of salt whenever you're adding a lot of sugar to something just really blooms the flavor.

It makes it seem so much more rounded than just a flat sweet flavor.

- Exactly.

Add a little bit more of our lemon juice.

If you were doing this and you still felt like it was too thick after adding in all your lemon juice, you could add in a little heavy cream or milk to it to help thin it out a little bit.

- Okay, how do you test the consistency?

How do you know if you need to add more liquid to it or not?

Just eyeball it and figure it out?

- Eyeball it, yeah.

So our frosting is ready.

So I've got my tip already in my bag, and I just hold it over my hand like this.

- Now, this tip is for the filling, and we have a different tip in here.

We have a star tip in here, right?

- Exactly.

- Just a little one.

You can use a a different shape if you want to.

You can even use a plain one if you wanted to.

- Exactly.

It is more traditional to use a plain one, but I think it's a little fun to use a star.

- 'Cause you see those ridges.

I like the ridges.

- Exactly.

So what I'm gonna do is put the frosting into my spoon, and then I'm gonna put it into my bag, and then I'm gonna use my thumb to scrape it off as I come through.

- That's so much better than getting your hands all sticky.

- Exactly.

- Because your hands would get mighty sticky from this.

- And this is gonna be bursting with lemon, and then we just shake it down, get our hand through, and we're ready.

These are ready now, so they're gonna go into a 300 degrees oven, and we wanna put it in for 15 minutes, but we wanna turn them, rotate them halfway through.

- So 15 minutes is the total cooking time?

- Yes.

- So at about seven minutes, we're gonna turn them around?

- Exactly.

- And that's because ovens don't heat evenly, and we wanna make sure that they're evenly cooked.

So into the oven we go.

Kelly, I think our macaronis are done.

- Let's check 'em.

- We've had 'em in the oven, we've turned them.

It's been 15 minutes.

Oh, look at 'em, oh they're perfect.

We've even got little feet.

Look, the little ruffle around the edge, those are what we call the feet.

- [Kelly] Now we have to make sure they fully cool before we can start decorating them.

- Nice and cool, they're actually just room temperature, is that good?

- [Kelly] Yes, that's actually perfect.

- [Pamela] I wouldn't put 'em in the refrigerator to cool them down?

- No.

- This is the fun part, isn't it?

- This where you get to be creative, and have fun, and play with different flavorings.

So here we have our lemon buttercream that we made.

I have already made a cream cheese frosting.

I have a plum jam, and then we've got some different sprinkles to decorate with.

- Oh, lovely.

- [Kelly] So I'm just gonna start by flipping over half of them.

- 'Cause those will be the bottoms.

- Yes.

This mat makes 15, so we have one lone one that doesn't get a partner.

(chuckles) - That would be a snack.

- Yes.

(both chuckling) - An open face macaron.

(chuckles) - So to start my piping- - [Pamela] So this will be the lemon frosting first?

- Yes, this is a lemon frosting.

So you just hold it, and you go around the edge, and then into your center.

- [Pamela] Just so there's a nice moist bite.

- Yes, and then you sandwich your cookies together, and then if you wanted to, you can put it in some sprinkles.

- Give it that beautiful decorative edge.

- [Kelly] There you go.

- [Pamela] That's so pretty.

- Thank you, and then just for variety, we can use our cream cheese frosting.

And for this one I'm gonna pair it with our plum jam, so I'm just going to pipe along the edge.

- I like the way you do this.

Yeah, I like, especially this little extra thing you've got going on here, it's so nice.

- And so I'm just gonna take a little bit of our plum jam, spoon it into the middle, and then do the same thing.

We'll just top it off to make our sandwich cookie.

All right.

- [Pamela] That looks great.

- Thank you.

So I'll just go ahead and frost the rest of these.

- Yeah, go ahead and frost them, and you pass to me and I'll put some in the sprinkles.

This is my favorite part of how you do these is making these beautiful edges, how pretty.

And see, look, you can see the edge from the star tip.

It makes a beautiful pretty edge, doesn't it?

I think it does.

So Kelly, I'm gonna add a couple of these to this plate that you have some other flavors on.

Tell us about what you've got going on on this plate, 'cause we know we've got the lemon and the cream cheese here.

What are these others?

- So on this one here, it's a strawberry cheesecake, so it's the- - [Pamela] Oh, fun.

- Yeah, so it's the cream cheese frosting with a strawberry jam that I made.

- Nice.

- And then on this one, this is another vanilla and plum, so that's why I added the purple sprinkles there.

And then this one is a hot honey, so it's the vanilla shells with hot honey on it and chili flakes.

So this one will really light you on fire.

- You said this was a new flavor of yours, right?

- Yes, yeah, and it's my new favorite.

- Let me present all of these, 'cause this has a beautiful variety on here.

Look at all of these beautiful, beautiful macarons.

This is actually glitter that she made.

How did you make the glitter?

- Oh, that is corn starch, food coloring, and water, and then it's dehydrated and gone through a food processor.

- And then just broken up in the food processor.

Look at these beautiful macaronis.

Kelly, thank you for joining us on the set of "Charlotte Cooks" today.

And we have a website at pbscharlotte.org where you can grab all of our recipes.

You can send me an email at Pamela, P-A-M-E-L-A dot roberts, R-O-B-E-R-T-S @cpcc.edu, and I will send you a link that has all of our season's recipes on it, where you can find 'em on our website quite easily.

So thank you for watching this episode of "Charlotte Cooks," and Kelly, thanks for joining us.

This is beautiful, this is really beautiful.

And don't forget about Humble Crumble.

We'll see you next time, and thank you for watching this episode of "Charlotte Cooks."

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