Macarons are French meringue biscuits, brightly coloured, very photogenic and deceptively difficult to master. And yet I did. And then I promptly stopped making them altogether.
I had been struggling with my health for a few years, my work was winding down and I found myself without tangible proof of doing well at anything. Validation is abundant when you’re at work; when my client approved a book cover design; that’s a good job, when I finished a round of corrections; good job, when my invoice is paid, good job!
When work went away, the good jobs and gold stars went with it.
It was now up to me to decide if I was doing well or not. And doing well when you’re chronically ill is confusing. Is resting a good job? Or is a work-out a good job?
I missed school reports. I craved gold stars and inked smiley stamps that say, yes! this is it, this is the right path. Keep going!
The messy middle of success that cannot be defined was exhausting. I wanted data. I wanted something solid to pin success to, even if the rest of life was unpinnably nebulous.
So, for the sake of my own mental health, I tried mastery. I wanted to be certain I was succeeding at something, anything. My target: macarons. I was already a keen baker but I had more interest in things with space for riffing and inaccuracies. Choc-chip biscuits that you can subtitute any number of ingredients and they’re still good. That sort of thing. But for this experiment, I wanted something binary. It had to be clearly right or wrong. Importantly, being wrong couldn’t break the bank or my brain. Macarons were fussy enough to sustain my interest and cheap enough in time and ingredients that I wouldn’t care when I failed. I’ll also admit my ego liked that it is a smidge impressive to be able to make these little jewel-box gems.
For six months I made macarons twice a week — sometimes more. You’d think that you’d master them quite quickly but I held the bar for perfection quite high. It felt good to strive.
My metric for a perfect macaron was as follows; the shells must be shiny, they must be crisp. The interior must be fudgey and perfectly pocketed wth tiny bubbles of air. The inherent sweetness must be balanced with sour or bitter or nutty. It must not be cloyingly sweet.
I experimented with blitzing the almond meal (right) and with adding liquid essences (wrong). I tried to colour them with supermarket colours, (very wrong). I upgraded to concentrated gel colours (right). I folded and whipped. I tried French meringue versus Italian and over time my shells got better and better.
The macarons along the way were mostly okay. A few batches failed badly enough to become blitzed into ice-cream topping and one or two went straight in the bin. Sometimes I would have three successes in a row and riding high on those gold stars the fourth bake would blister and bring me crashing back to humility.
I never felt beaten by them, though. They were only ever just a touch out of grasp and so I persisted. The stakes were low enough and I had been smart enough not to declare my ambition to the world. This was just for me. I continued; I learned that humidity kills meringue — I would have to factor in the weather. I learned that the piped, unbaked shells must rest for a while to skin over, ensuring crispy tops and chewy underbellies… Time after time I made macarons.
My husband loved the project for a few months but even he grew tired of eating them so eventually I expanded my audience to neighbours and friends and then — after a hundred-or-so batches of middling macarons I could reliably make great biscuits. Chewy, light as a feather, shiny-shelled sweets.
My metric of mastery was to make five perfect batches in a row. I did.
And then I quit.
Why? because I didn’t have anywhere to progress. I didn’t want to make macarons. I just wanted to feel accomplished. The experiment worked. In choosing something small to master I grew expertise and confidence and I learned that the gremlins in my brain don’t care about what it is I achieve, they just want to feel clever. Feeling clever came in the way of triumph after struggle.
In the process of learning the art of macarons I found the less measurable activities of life more tolerable. I had a scorecard again, and with it, relief.
Since then I have also mastered (and happily quit);
- Gluten-free sourdough bread – I made my own starter
- Kombucha – I grew my own scoby (predictable yet?)
- And Ice-cream – I have molecularly broken down the fat to sugars ratios and have now created the perfect creamy, dairy-free Ice-cream recipe that I still make from time to time
Sometimes I’m curious to know if I could whip up a batch of perfect macarons. I do think I could achieve perfection in fewer batches this time. I’ve retained a lot of the required knowledge to succeed. But I don’t care to try, it was never about the biscuits, mastery helped me manage self doubt.
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