Macarons are a ‘fiddly’ cookie

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Strawberry Lemonade Macarons is not for a novice baker.

Brittnay Buchanan Wise said an excelled baker should try this cookie.

Macarons “are a complete and utterly fiddly cookie, is what I like to tell people,” she said.

This is the season to give it a try.

“It’s a good summer recipe,” Wise said about the macarons.

She said she made the recipe her own after combining a couple different ones.

“The outside has a little bit of a crunch. The inside has a little bit of a chew. They’re just different and fun and I love them.”

Don’t mistake macarons with macaroons, which are made with sweetened flaked coconut.

Macarons “are a sandwich cookie so you have to whip up the egg whites and add the sugar, then fold in the ingredients a certain amount of times. And then you have to let them rest until they form a skin on the top.

“And sometimes that can take 10 minutes and sometimes that can take an hour,” Wise said.

If you let them sit too long, that can also mess up the baking, she said.

“It’s just one of those things you have to play around with.”

Wise said she will make a giant batch of the shells, then freeze them.

The fillings can be made with whatever you want, she said.

Wise estimated she has done 20 different fillings, with s’mores and salted caramel being her favorites.

She said she can’t get the French method of making macarons work right, so she uses the Swiss method, which entails heating up the sugar and egg whites over a double boiler before whipping it into a meringue. Once the meringue has been whipped to stiff peaks, the dry ingredients (almond flour and powdered sugar) are folded in.

Her recipe is in grams, and Wise weighs out the ingredients on a kitchen scale.

Weighing food is more accurate than taking a volume measurement, which is done in cups.

Wise prefers baking, saying it’s a family tradition.

“Mom baked. My grandmothers baked. It’s just kind of what they did.”

Wise is a 2006 Bowling Green High School graduate and earned a degree in education from Bowling Green State University.

She formerly taught in Toledo but after her school closed during the pandemic, she teaches at home.

Wise started baking during that time and playing around with the more complicated recipes.

She went on a girls’ trip to Springfield, Illinois, had macarons, and decided to make them.

“I figured it out, and Pinterest is kind of where I live and found all these different things I wanted to make and started making them.”

Wise said she may follow a recipe verbatim the first time but switch it up the next time.

Her husband Adam is the cook in the family, she said, and he is not a sweets eater.

“Sweets are my thing. They’re my weakness. I could just have desserts all day long.”

Wise said she is excited over the double oven that is being added in the couple’s remodeled kitchen.

Son Cooper, who will be a sixth grader at Elmwood Middle School, likes her cookies and is her taste-tester.

Wise said she finds baking relaxing — it gives her something to do and ends in something delicious.

“The whole thing with baking is that you want to share it with somebody.”

She said she would love to open a bakery and has started her own Britt’s Bake Shop out of her home.

Message her on her Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/brittsbakeshop3416.

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