Reviews for I Love Macarons

The average rating for I Love Macarons based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-13 00:00:00 James Holbrook This is the cutest cookbook alive. As a fan of well-designed books and good food photography, I would buy it and keep it for this reason alone. However, on a practical level, its loaded with mistakes. There are typos galore. Some of the errors are just misplaced punctuation, but others are incorrect measurement conversions. FAIL. More importantly, I don't think the recipes were tested with what's available in American stores and prepared in American kitchens. The ingredients section call for cornstarch-free powdered sugar; I found this difficult to locate, and I live in San Francisco. Also, you'll notice in the macaron-baking section, our home pastry chef slides her baking pan in a Japanese-style oven the size of a big toaster oven. I'm sure that baking in a larger American-style oven, which may be gas-powered, would require different baking instructions. In fact, for my own oven, I found 15 min at 375 degrees far too long and/or high. Having made my first batch, it wasn't a total loss. The buttercream recipe was fine, and the cookies tasted great, though they looked like rejects thrown in the back dumpster of Pierre Herme. So, to sum up, this book is great for inspiration, but find your macaron recipe elsewhere.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-02-23 00:00:00 Mario Sanchez I Love Macarons / B00B2XPBLW So, everyone else on earth has already said this about this book, but I'll add on to the pile: The pictures are pretty, the ideas are great, the recipes are flat-out wrong. I haven't had a chance to confirm that the recipes use too much egg-whites, but I wouldn't be surprised because our first batch was too runny. But! Everything plumped up and I even had pied-feet and was feeling great... ...until the oven burned the cookies like whoa, because 375 degrees fahrenheit for 15-18 minutes is going to practically set your cookies on fire. (Not really, but they WILL smell like burned popcorn.) That was quite the bummer and meant that I had to guesstimate how long to cook the next two trays, and it ended up being a bit of a mess. Then the icing. The recipe seems to be trying to get your sugar-water mixture to the soft ball candy stage, but 4 minutes in the microwave (which is the STARTING point given, with more time added "as needed") ended up in a caramel that was practically black. And subsequent tests with the microwave convinced me that the line between soft ball stage and hard thread stage is too fine to try to achieve in my microwave. So that's a huge disappointment. I think this book is pretty, the pictures are lovely, and in terms of talking you through the theory of macaroons and the available flavor combinations, there's a lot of good material here. But in terms of, you know, actually making the cookies, this book is worse than useless because unless you read the reviews, you'll go into this trusting the book and end up with burned cookies and burned sugar. A lot of effort with nothing to show for it. Two stars because no matter how pretty the book is, someone should have tested the recipes before publishing this edition. (Macaroon book, you had ONE JOB!) ~ Ana Mardoll