A taste of the finicky world of French macarons
Ashley Savoy is the owner of Savvy Sweets and Treats in Bow (387-0241, savvysweetsandtreats.com), a home bakery specializing in sweet baked goods. She sells cakes, cupcakes and cookies, but has developed a following for her French-style macarons.
Savoy said a common misconception new customers make is confusing macarons — meringue-based cookies that sandwich a sweet filling — with macaroons, the chewy coconut cookies popular around Passover.
“There’s a difference between the two,” she said. “Sometimes people use the two words interchangeably. However, if you went to Europe and you said a macaron, most people would know exactly what you were talking about and not think of the coconut cookie at all.”
Macarons have a reputation among home bakers for being temperamental and difficult to consistently get right. Savoy said she only learned to make them as part of the courting process when she started seeing her now-husband.
“I started because macarons were one of my husband’s favorite cookies when we first started dating. And I thought, ‘I can definitely do this. I bake all the time.’ I had no idea what I was getting myself into.” She taught herself the basics of macarons, but, she said, “they’re like a dysfunctional baking cookie because once you figure it out and you get it and you know how to cook them they’re not that bad, but getting there can be really quite a love-hate relationship.”
Now she feels like she has a handle on macaron-making.
“When I go to an event, I bring probably a maximum of nine flavors,” she said, “but I would say that I make well over 200 different flavor combinations at this point.” She has a core stable of the chewy meringue cookies, but the variety of fillings is enormous. “You can flavor your cookie, which adds an extra level of flavor to it. But [for] the filling on the inside there’s just like a slew of things that you can do with that. You can use a ganache; you could do a buttercream, you can do an ermine frosting — that’s a frosting that is a little bit less sweet and it’s made with flour.”
One of the hallmarks of good Parisian-style macarons is their vivid colors. For Savoy, the colors serve an additional purpose.
“A lot of times,” she said, “ I do salted caramel and I [make it with] a blue shell, which is mostly just for my own sanity and to remember what it is. Some use more natural food coloring, but almost all macarons have some sort of food coloring and that’s how you get that vibrant coloring. Sometimes people bite into one of my blue macarons, and then their whole mouth turns blue and they’re like, ‘Oh my goodness!’”
The key to a good macaron, Savoy said, is mastering meringue.
“I think meringues are much friendlier than they get a rep for,” she said. “It’s easy to break a meringue, but I would say that there are a couple of things that you can do to ensure that your meringue is going to be the best it can be. The first thing is wiping all of your equipment down with either lemon juice or some vinegar — something acidic. That’s going to remove any fat residue that might be left there. Sometimes even soap residue can affect [the egg whites in your meringue]. The other trick to meringue is that you need to whip them for far longer than you think you’re going to. It’s better to over-whip your meringue than it is to under-whip it. The stiffer meringue is a little bit more forgiving than the loose meringue, which might lose all structure altogether. And then that’s when you get those like flat, weird-looking brown ones.”
Macarons
Ashley Savoy sells her baked goods, including macarons, at Concord’s Winter Market (downtownconcordwinterfarmersmarket.com), at selected events, and through Savvy Sweets and Treats’ website at savvysweetsandtreats.com.
Featured photo: Courtesy photo.
