French Macarons Class

Matthew Woolen is a master pastry chef and has worked in a variety of Seattle restaurants, including gastropub Old Sage, Zhu Dang, and a gluten-free restaurant called Capitol Cider.

Matthew Woolen

The goal of this recipe was to transform a pumpkin spice latte into a filling for the perfect cookie: a pumpkin spice latte macaron.Whether you love the infamous PSL or not, it’s hard to argue against the combination of pumpkin, the king of fall fruits, and warm spices. There’s a reason we all eat pumpkin pies spiked with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and clove every year: They’re delicious.The PSL may be too sweet for some people for a coffee drink, but I figured it would be just right for filling a delicate macaron, with just a couple of tweaks. I use pumpkin purée, pumpkin spice, and a little espresso powder to mimic the PSL flavor profile, but I fold them all into a white chocolate ganache, which pipes out beautifully after it sets and cures.Of course, a macaron is more than just its filling, even if the filling does all the flavor work. Macarons are the perfect cookie not just because they’re sweet, or pretty to look at, or come in as many flavors as you can think of. They’re the perfect cookie because of their textural complexity: The “cookie” parts of a macaron, which are really meringues, are chewy, crispy, and soft, and as your teeth bite through the top and bottom cookies to meet in the creamy, sweet, and flavorful middle, you get all of those textures all at once. No other cookie delivers that experience.

The thing about perfect macarons is that they take work; more than work, they take practice; more than practice, they require that you understand your ingredients and your equipment. And then they take a little bit more practice.Macaron-making is so technique-driven that we created a <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/french-macarons">whole class on making them</a>, with video tutorials for each and every step of the process. If you want to explore the ins and outs of making macarons, I strongly suggest you check out the class. You will be far better prepared for success.Macaron cookies start with a tant pour tant, a sifted combination of equal parts fine almond meal and powdered sugar. (This recipes makes more tant pour tant than is needed for the cookies: the extra is just to give you a buffer against spills.) Once sifted, it’s mixed with egg whites to form a stiff paste, and into that stiff paste you mix an Italian meringue—whipped egg whites tempered with hot sugar syrup—and the result is a pipeable “cookie” batter. To make macaron cookies in any color imaginable, you add food coloring during this step, and you can get really creative with it.Using stencils, pipe the batter into rounds, then let the rounds set up and dry a little, so their exteriors take on a thin, tacky skin, or pellicle. The drying process is crucial for ensuring the cookies rise evenly and vertically in the oven, and prevents cracking, producing the iconic macaron cookie shape.Once the cookies cool, pair similarly shaped cookies together so you can make neat-looking sandwiches, then set yourself up with a little assembly line: agitate the white chocolate PSL ganache to get it to a nice, pipeable consistency, pipe out just enough filling into half of the cookies, then carefully make sandwiches with a visible layer of filling that bulges slightly around the sides. Chill the completed cookies for a little while to let the filling set up, and there you have it: perfect PSL macarons.Again, there’s a lot of nuance in executing each of these steps, and there’s a lot of precise technique involved. If you aren’t practiced at it, you may not produce “perfect” macarons the first or even the second or third time, but the cookies you make will be very tasty. To increase your chances of success early on, our classes will help, but they can’t do it for you. There’s really no substitute for practice.But maybe, just maybe, a perfect pumpkin spice latte macaron will make the practice seem worth it; I sure think so. And once you get the technique down and make one perfect macaron, you’ll want to make more, especially since the flavor possibilities are limitless.

Ultimate Pumpkin Spice Latte Macarons