Macaron Class with Tartelette

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to be able to partake in an amazing Macaron Class taught by none other than The Macaron Goddess herself, Helene Dujardin (Tartelette)

The class was organized by Rachael (La Fuji Mama) with the help of Jenny (Devour the World) and Gaby (What's Gaby cooking).

Before I dive into the post, I wanted to share with you one of the most important if not the most important lesson we learned this day (at least in my humble opinion):

When making macaron's, even though you execute each and every single step in the macaron making process with perfection, there is still a chance your end result will be a less than "perfect" macaron. And always remember... this is not your fault!

I would like to call this... "The Oven of Doom" effect.

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That being said, we can now move on to the very exciting and enlightening French Macaron Class.

The class took place at the Academy of Culinary Education in Woodland Hills, CA.


I took a few pictures of the school's pantry racks.


As each of her students arrived at the Academy, Helene greeted us with a big smile and introduced herself.


She was also gracious enough to prepare these goodie bags for her eager students.

Each goodie bag contained the following:

18" pastry bag
Ateco #807 tip
Candy-n-Cake powdered food coloring
Helene's Famous Macaron Recipe
A small box for us to take our macarons home in
Refreshments (Fuji Water & Pistachios)


One of the very first things we learned was that precision is key when it comes to macaron making.


Each ingredient was weighed in grams according to Helene's Macaron Recipe, here we have ground almonds.


Precisely weighed powdered sugar and aged egg whites.


The ground almonds and powdered sugar are then combined and free of any lumps.


Helene goes over the process of making the meringue for the macaron shells and explains why it is very important to use aged egg whites when making French Macarons.

The aging removes moisture from the egg whites which in turn results in a much stabler meringue.


Once the egg whites have reached the glossy meringue stage we slowly pour in the granulated sugar to simulate "rain".


Here my egg whites have reached the glossy meringue stage, or as Helene likes to refer to it the "thick shaving cream" stage.

We were also tought how to fold in the dry ingredients into the meringue, and when to stop.


At this point we were told if we wanted to add a little color to our macarons we could. I decided to add a bit of the powdered food coloring from my goodie bag... well, what I thought was a bit.


Lo and behold I ended up with Avatar Blue Macaron batter.



One other key element for successfull macaron making is Mise en place.

Therefore we made sure our pastry bag with tip and baking sheets were ready and on standby for us as soon as our macaron batter had reached the perfect consistency for piping.



My Avatar Blue Macarons piped and ready for the oven!


Helene, unknowingly feeding "The Oven of Doom" our beautiful macarons.

We had done everything to perfection with Helene's seal of approval nonetheless (well except for a piping misshap here and there which was due to our own wrongdoing). That is... until the "Oven of Doom" took over our beautiful macarons.

It turns out that because of the way the industrial convection oven was circulating the air, only the baking sheets placed on the two top oven racks were baked properly. (Totally out of our control.)

And this my friends... is just one of the reasons why the quest for the "Perfect Macaron" will continue to live on.

C'est la vie... they still tasted magnifique!

Rather than post a picture of my so-so macarons, I made a couple a batches at home, hopefully these are worthy of Helene's seal of approval. :)

So stay tuned for more macaron making action and recipes!


All in all it was truly an amazing experience, thank you Helene!