Pecan Praline Macarons

I had never made a macaron before and had a lot of egg whites left over from my previous baking.  Most macarons are made with almonds and filled with butter cream, but I got it in my head to make one from pecans and fill with salted caramel.

I had two goals:

Get the cool ruffled "foot"that is the sign of a perfectly made macaron

Get a delicious, crunchy then chewy texture

Spoiler Alert:  I only succeed in one of these.

I started with the recipe from here:

https://www.howtocookthat.net/public_html/easy-macaron-macaroon-recipe/

First I blended together in my kitchenaid:

4 egg whites and 70g "caster"sugar, where "caster" means I pulsed some normal sugar in my food proccessor lazily.

Made a perfect meringue fluffy meringue, so far so good.

Then I made my add in mix:

120g pecans

230g "powedered sugar"

No salt (the pecans were already salty)

What I did here was just throw normal sugar and pecans into the food proccessor, and ran into two issues:

First, while the coffee grinder makes escellent powdered sugar right off, the food proccessor doesn't work as well.  Second, pecans are SUPER oily.

I was supposed to have a light dust I could sift into my egg whites, instead I had a thick, wet, dough that I had to crumble over.

Then I mixed them:

At this point things had already run off the rails, but I did manage to get a nice incorporated marshamallowy consistency and pipe everythign out into little dallops.

Popped them into a 300F degree oven, one tray at a time.

Filling!

I stole my caramel recipe from here:

http://sallysbakingaddiction.com/homemade-salted-caramel-recipe/

It's exactly the same, except I didn't have cream so I added whole milk-- you know because they're basically identical. . . .

So then my caramel seperated.

Fun Fact:  If your caramel ever seperates, you can re-emulsify it by taking it off the heat and running a stick blender through it for 3min while it cools.  

Here's the assembled product:

And my cool Instagram montage:

Lessons Learned:  Macarons are basically 90% sugar.  I actually was turned off baking of a bit by the sheer unhealthiness of them.  Soooooo much sugar.

That said, these were pretty amazing.  Crunchy, then chewy, salty and sweet with a strong pecan flavor.  They disappeared from both T and my work pretty quick.