Idiot-proof Coconut & Lime Macaroons and what not to use in Meringues

I call these macaroons 'idiot-proof' because, well, not the world's greatest baker here, but these turn out beautifully.

One of the problems with making Tart de Bry is that you have heaps and heaps of egg white left over. Meringues and macaroons seem the natural solution and this recipe has one of my favourite taste combinations - the tangy sourness of lime paired with coconut (yes, I'm a big fan of Piña Coladas too). The texture is also wonderful - a crunchy and crumbly exterior melting into a moist interior.

As well as the lime icing over the coconut macaroons, the original recipe suggested topping them with chopped pistachios. However I personally don't usually have pistachios in the pantry (plus it also struck me as being a bit of a taste overkill and somewhat twee). The original recipe was in "The Cookie Book" by Catherine Atkinson, but I've fiddled around with the amounts a little:

Coconut & Lime Macaroons
Macaroon ingredients
3 large egg whites
2 cups shredded dessicated coconut (sweet)
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla essence
2 Tb flour

Icing ingredients
1 cup icing sugar
1 grated lime - rind thereof
2 Tb lime juice

1. Heat the oven to 180F/350C/GM4.


2. Mix all the macaroon ingredients together.


3. Put in a pan over a low heat and cook for about 6 - 8 minutes, stirring continuously. 


4. Remove when the mixture has the consistency of thick porridge.


5. Put down baking parchment or (best still!) silicon baking sheets on an oven tray.


6. Dollop a large tablespoon of the mixture onto the sheet and mould into a little mound. I got 12 macaroons from this amount.


7. Bake the macaroons about 15 minutes or so, until they turn golden brown.


8. Leave them to cool completely while still on the baking sheets.


9. In the meantime, mix together the icing ingredients. You want the icing to be the consistency of extra thick cream.


10. Dribble a couple of teaspoons of the icing over each cool macaroon (if you do it whilst they are still warm the cookies are saturated too much with the icing).


11. Leave icing to harden (if you have the patience) then eat! Totally scrumptious.

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I also made some Almond Macaroons, from Nigella Lawson's recipe in "How to Eat" (p.20). These turned out tasting - as well as looking - pretty darn nice, which pleased me.

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Just to break my winning baking streak however, the Meringues (also Nigella Lawson's recipe which I have previously made with great success) were a disaster. I wanted to make brown sugar meringues, but had no brown sugar. Oh well, thought I, I'll just powderize some Demerara sugar and use that instead. Should be prettymuch the same result.

BZZZZZZT!!! Wrong!

The sugar sunk the beaten egg whites. I ended up a spooning brown eggwhite liquid the consistency of cream into tin tartlet cases. They came out of the oven with a wonderful little hollow tent of crunchy meringue - and at the bottom of the case that soggy mass of sugar which anyone who's flunked Meringue School is familiar with. Blah.

A quick search of the web gives me a probable reason for the failure:

"...Demerara sugars [are] unrefined or raw sugar coated with molasses and processed into crystals or cubes of sugar during the first crystallization of the cane syrup. As a crystal particle its size is larger, the texture is coarser and it is stickier than refined sugar... When using the refined demerara sugar in baked goods, be aware that it has similar properties of honey, slowing down the reaction with the yeast during the early stages of the dough rising."

"This type of [soft] Brown Sugar... is basically a refined white sugar or sugar syrup with molasses added in varying amounts to produce a darker colored and stronger tasting sugar. The various colors (light to dark) of this sugar will contain from 1% to 4% cane syrup that has not been refined out of the sugar contents. The lighter the color of the Brown Sugar, the less syrup contained in the sugar. Thus, the ligher colored sugars will have a texture that is more granular and less moist. The flavor of the lighter colored sugars will not be as complex as the darker colored surgars and will be sweeter tasting. As a rule, the lighter the color, the less intense the molasses flavor in the sugar. However, lighter or darker soft Brown Sugars can be substituted for each other as long as the recipe does not require more than 1/4 cup of sugar.

Brown Sugar can be substituted for white sugar, resulting in a more moist baked good providing a flavor with a hint of butterscotch. It is not advisable to substitute liquid or granulated brown sugar for soft Brown Sugar, since the moisture content of soft brown sugar is higher, providing a different texture in the baked goods than can be achieved using other types of Brown Sugar." - Recipetips.com

We live and learn! Soft Brown Sugar only next time. Though the little tented parts were delicious, so it might be interesting to see if I could repeat the result, using a thin layer of the meringue liquid over some sort of fruit or curd tart.