Beary cute macarons

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I finally decided to try to make macarons again. I made these last weekend as a possibility for Jenny’s virtual baby shower ^[2] and halfway through I decided to make the baby cake pops ^[2] instead. You might even recognize them as the inspiration for the bears I made on her baby cake pop bibs. : )

I wasn’t going to post these because I didn’t get them just quite right. The feet seemed too tall, they were too brown on some of the edges, but mostly they were too hollow inside. Too fragile.

But they were also too cute. So I finished decorating them because one day I will get these little guys perfect. I just have to figure out the right combination of factors to work in my favor. Macarons are finicky. You can have too much almond flour, egg white, or sugar. You can whip them too long. Fold them too long and a number of other things including humidity, oven temp and age of your egg whites. Guess I just need another hands on lesson from Tartelette ^[3] – they worked great when I made them with her. But on my own. I haven’t had the inside texture work out how I want them.

I used the recipe and directions for the macarons from this post ^[4]. It works. I just need to make some tweaks on my end.

Try it or use a macaron recipe that works for you. I’d love for you to share a link below if you have one you really like.

So anyway, here’s how I made them into little bears … they were inspired by the cutest little bunny macarons ^[5] I found through pinterest.

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First, I used a template to draw my bear shapes on parchment paper. Place the drawn side face down on the cookie sheet when you bake.

Here’s the template ^[7] if you’d like it.

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Pipe your shapes and let them set for a few minutes. A skin will start to form on the top that creates the shell and feet once they bake.

Here’s a link to some helpful macaron info from Tartelette ^[9].

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Last time I used a larger tip, but this time I used a Wilton #10 tip so I could control the size of the ears better. The batter flows pretty easily and I didn’t want jumbo ears.

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If you let the skin form on the head for just a couple of minutes first, you can easily pipe the ears on either side. If you pipe everything at the same time, they won’t be as defined. They’ll look blobby. Blobby bears.

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Pipe and repeat.

And bake.

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Then when they hopefully come out great, you can just decorate.

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You can use candy coating to pipe on the bottom half of the faces.

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While it’s still wet, place a mini chocolate chip in position for the nose and let dry.

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Then draw on the eyes and mouth with an edible ink pen and sandwich the macarons with chocolate ganache.

Even though these aren’t perfect, I hope the pictures will help you make some macarons that are beary cute.

I think they’d be adorable for a baby shower and so pretty in all pastel colors.