Just to give you a head start, I already started my year by baking yet again the well known French macarons. During the past few days of celebrating the holidays with friends and families, I was delightfully bombarded with rich and glorious desserts. To name a few, my mouth has been enjoying the company of turtle pies, decadent chocolate cakes and some luscious cheesecakes. You would have thought I already had my fill of sweets but guess again.

 

After all the " not so guiltless" foods, I actually thought this is one sweet thing that I could still make room for. If you think about it, it doesn't contain any fat at all, which is a definite check on my list. Now, I wouldn't want to ruin the "fat free" concept so I decided to use jam as a filling instead of the normally used rich ganache or buttercream. For this post, I decided to try Ms. Humble's recipe and made it into a Vanilla bean macaron with strawberry jam filling and if you read my previous post, I did promise that I would be making varieties for my dearest cousin. 

Cookies
Line 2 baking sheets with silicon mats or parchment papers, set aside. Prepare your dry ingredients, weigh out your almond meal and powdered sugar and sift the 2 together to avoid and produce fine textured cookies. Set aside and start making the meringue.

Weigh out your egg whites and granulated sugar. Using a whisk attachment in your kitchen mixer, start whipping your egg whites in medium speed until the egg whites become foamy.Increase speed to medium-high and slowly add granulated sugar and beat until you have achieved soft peaks, add vanilla bean seeds and continue beating until you have a meringue with shiny stiff peaks.

Add all of the ground almond mixture into the meringue and start folding quickly but gently until no streaks of meringue remains. Test if its ready by dropping a few batter in a plate, if the ribbon is visible then slowly disappears in the plate, it is ready.  

Using a plain round tip, start piping your macaron batters in the prepared pans. Let it form shells depending on the weather, normally it only takes 30 minutes. Check by gently touching the top of the cookies, if the batter no longer sticks to your fingers and the crust looks dry and feels solid it is ready.

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit bake for 8-10 minutes (mine took 15 minutes) depending on the shape of your cookies. Transfer the cookies in a wire rack to cool completely before removing the cookies.

Assembly
Simply put a small amount of Strawberry jam in between 2 macarons and enjoy!