Baking Macs @ Indonesia

Phewww, finally I get the chance to update my blog today.. I started taking macaron orders last week and yesterday was my biggest order so far, 150 pieces of those little dainty almond sandwiches. Baking all those macs was definitely tiring, but I enjoyed it because my macs turned out looking better than I expected :D Was it that easy? Did it turn out great the first time I baked them in Indonesia? Noooppeeeee... At first, I used Pierre Herme's recipe with the Italian meringue and the first few batches turned out great. Well, a little bit too sweet but that's due to the higher sweetness of Indonesian sugar compared to US sugar. Oh, and the filling melted so fast that I didn't even have time to pipe them onto the shells before they dripped from the piping bag to all over my counter -___-" Absolutely hate the effect of humidity and heat in Indonesia on macarons :( The 2 batches I made were for this month's Mac Attack: Fruit, thus the inclusion of griottine and berries into the fillings. I liked the pistachio griottine much better than the white chocolate berry because the second one was too sweet for my taste *white chocolate was never my favorite*

 Milk chocolate pistachio griottine macaron

White chocolate berry macarons

As you can see, my macs still looked good despite all the mishaps. And then, everything went wrong. I used the same exact recipe, ingredients, technique, oven, mixer, everything, but I kept failing. My macs didn't rise, instead they became just like regular meringue cookies. When they did form a skin and feet, the tops broke into little volcanoes. I made 5 batches and only got 8 decent looking macs :( Until now, I still don't know what was wrong. After I failed again and again, I was ready to give up and I only had 3 days to make 150 macs. If I were in the US with all my baking tools, it wouldn't have been a problem. However, my baking stuffs are still being shipped and I had to deal with the new ingredients. So, I decided to go with the simpler French meringue method. I was very skeptical because I tried it once and it didn't work. Surprisingly, I got really nice shiny macarons with feet! I was ecstatic! Then everything went smoothly, I finished baking all 150 macs in a day :D I think I'm done baking macs for a while, unless someone orders them. Okay, below is the pic for the French meringue macs, til later!!

Dark chocolate, matcha, vanilla bean, pistachio, rose macarons