Having made another Tiramisu for my parents a few weeks ago, I had another glut of egg whites. This presented the perfect opportunity for me to try my hand at making macarons for the third time.

I wanted to switch things up this time and do a chocolate shell. I found a chocolate macaron recipe from from David Lebovitz that looked promising.

The recipe was pretty standard. Beat your eggs until they are nice and stiff, fold in the flour/almond mixture, then pipe the mixture onto parchment paper. In my last few attempts I found my macarons I made were way too huge, so I did my best to pipe smaller macarons this go round.

David claimed that in his experience letting your piped macarons sit to build up a skin didn’t help with creating feet, so I decided to skip that step and bake the macarons after piping them. The big result? No feet. Third attempt, no feet. I really don’t know what I am doing wrong. The only thing I can think of is that I am not putting in enough dry ingredients into the batter, as I have found the batter to be a little runny.

Well enough about feet, everything else about the macarons turned out great! For flavors I went with a vanilla butter cream recipe I found online. I altered the recipe slightly by scraping the seeds of a raw vanilla bean into cream.

In addition to the vanilla butter cream I wanted to make some macarons with a chocolate ganache filling. Making chocolate ganache is really easy. Basically chop up your best chocolate (12oz) and place in a heat resistant bowl. Heat up your cream (1 cup) until it starts to boil. Once it begins to boil quickly pour the cream over the chocolate and whisk until the two are blended together. Once the ganache is creamy and smooth you can add in some vanilla extract and rum for some added flavor.

All in all I am happy with my latest macarons. I definitely prefer the chocolate ganache ones to the vanilla butter cream, but both are pretty delicious. I just wish I was able to create them with feet. Next time I will try to add a bit more of the dry ingredients and go back to letting them sit before baking. Some day I will master the art of the macaron.