Perfect French Macarons #2 - Designer Macarons

In this lesson you'll find all recipe books that are used throughout this course, as well as other downloadable documents that you'll need. All course materials are delivered in digital format as PDF documents. We recommend downloading all of them to your hard drive, saving them and printing them as required.

Many tools and ingredients used in the course appear in the Class Store. It is delivered as a PDF document with many links to various products and stores where you can find them. The Class Store document is attached to this lesson, and we recommend downloading it to your hard drive before you start working. 

Before you start decorating, you obviously need to prepare some macaron shells, and there are several ways to do that. In this lesson Irit explores the options you have for making macaron shells, as well as for purchasing ready made ones for your decorations. She goes deep on one of the methods - preparing macaron batter using mixes -  which is so simple that anyone can use it to make macaron shells. It's a great method which gives you a good balance between simplicity and flexibility.

Pastry tips are used often in this course for various purposes, so it makes sens to take a bit of time to learn a few important facts about them. In this lesson Irit provides some necessary background about pastry tips: what are they used for, what brands are out there, and how to figure out which tip to use for which purpose.

In this lesson Irit goes over the recipes that are taught in this section, namely Royal Icing and modeling chocolate, two of the most important recipes used by decorators. You'll explore the advantages and disadvantages of making these recipes at home rather than purchasing a ready made product at the store. This understanding will help you to make important decisions about when it's preferred to make your own Royal Icing or modeling chocolate.

Download the recipe book for Royal Icing, which is attached to this lesson.

Learn what Royal Icing is, understand its advantages and why you should consider it for your decoration projects. We’ll compare different ways of making Royal Icing, and demonstrate a great technique for making it from scratch and for coloring it.

Download the recipe book for modeling chocolate, which is attached to this lesson.

Modeling chocolate is easy to work with and is widely used in many decoration projects. In this lesson you'll compare it to fondant, understand when it's appropriate to use it, and discover how to make it from yourself and color it to any tone you like.

In this lesson you'll get an introduction to one of the core topics of this course: piping macarons in any shape you want. You'll understand why it's really important to be able to pipe macarons that are not round, and compare various tools and techniques that enable you to do that.

Download the recipe book for the topic of making macarons in various shapes, which is attached to this lesson. You'll also find here all of the template we'll use in the next lesson, on which we'll pipe the batter. It's important to download and print the template before starting the next lesson. 

In this lesson Irit walks you through the important steps of creating macarons in almost any shape you can imagine. She'll demonstrate in detail two techniques to do that, and show you how to create many unique macaron shapes, such as panda bears, snowmen, doggies, owls and many more! The macaron shells you'll pipe in this lesson will be used later in the course as the basis for some of the more elaborate designs we'll work on.

In this lesson irit describes the decoration techniques that are covered in this course, and provides a brief introduction to each one of them. In particular she talks about freehand drawing, piping Royal Icing and brushed embroidery, making flat cutout decorations, creating molded decorations and using specialty tools to create textures and patterns. All of these techniques will be covered in great detail in the next lessons.

In this section Irit introduces the subject of decorating macarons using freehand drawing. Irit explains the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques, and when it’s appropriate to use them.

Download the recipe book for the topic of decorating macarons using freehand techniques, which is attached to this lesson. 

In this lesson you'll get the ins and outs of drawing and painting on macaron cookies freehand style. Irit demonstrates how to create many unique and interesting macaron designs, such as coffee beans, jungle, animals, emoji, halloween, Valentine's day, spiders, basketball, and more. Finally you'll explore a great techniques for creating glitzy and especially fancy macarons by painting them with metallic colors.

In this section we’ll focus on decoration techniques using Royal Icing, which is a frosting that’s used quite a bit by many decorators. We’ll talk about the advantages of using royal icing to create decorations on cakes and cookies, and go over multiple decoration techniques that utilize royal icing: piping, brushed embroidery and stenciling.

Download the recipe book for the topic of decorating macarons using Royal Icing piping techniques, which is attached to this lesson. 

In this lesson Irit demonstrates how to create many interesting designs, by piping royal icing on macarons. Learn how to make many kinds of cute, funny and elegant macaron designs such as monogram and letters, lines & pearls, frogs, Panda bears, piggies, teddy bears, donuts, snowmen and Emoji.

Download the recipe book for the topic of decorating macarons using Brushed Embroidery techniques, which is attached to this lesson. 

In this lesson Irit demonstrates one of her favorite royal icing techniques, which is called brushed embroidery. This technique enables you to create beautiful lace-like flowers or petals on top of your macarons.

Download the recipe book for the topic of decorating macarons using Royal Icing and stencils, which is attached to this lesson. 

In this lesson you'll explore one of the most interesting royal icing techniques, which is great for creating intricate and accurate patterns on macaron cookies. Irit demonstrates how to use royal icing with stencils to create these gorgeous patterns consistently and efficiently.

In this lesson Irit provides a quick summary of all Royal Icing techniques taught in this section.

In this section we're going to dedicate several lessons to decorating techniques that are based on molds. We’ll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using molds to create decorations and explore the many options you have when choosing the molds to use. We'll cover 3 decoration techniques that uses molds. Irit will demonstrate each of these techniques, and provide many examples that will help you to master them.

Download the recipe book for the topic of making flat cutout decorations for your macarons, which is attached to this lesson. 

In this lesson you’ll learn how to to make many kinds of flat "cutout" decoration elements from fondant or modeling chocolate, using various cutters and pastry tips. You’ll also discover how simple it is to use these cutout decorations to create many creative and fun macaron designs. We’ll start by making really simple decorations and progress to some that are a bit more advanced.

Download the recipe book for the topic of making 3D molded decorations for your macarons, which is attached to this lesson. 

In this lesson you’ll learn how to make 3D (molded) decorations for the macarons using specialty molds. What's great about these decorations is that they look really impressive and difficult to create but as you’ll see actually it's exactly the opposite. Making them is fairly quick and easy.

Download the recipe book for the topic of making decorations with various kinds of textures and patterns for your macarons, which is attached to this lesson. 

In this lesson you’ll learn several techniques to adorn the macarons using elegant textures and patterns. These decorations add style to your designs and spice them up. To create the patterns we’ll use various decorating tools that are really easy to use, and relatively inexpensive. As you'll discover, you can get impressive results very quickly using these tools.

In this lesson Irit briefly summarizes all the decorating techniques that we covered so far in the course.

Download the recipe book for the topic of assembling macarons and macaron lollipops, which is attached to this lesson. You can also download here the recipe books for four kinds of ganaches. If you'd like to use these ganaches to fill your macarons, we recommend that you download and print them, and make one or more of the recipes before you begin working.

In this lesson irit demonstrates how to to fill and assemble the macarons. You’ll discover how to fill them with flavored ganache as well as with some easy alternatives that you can purchase at the store. Beyond assembling standard macaron cookies you’ll also discover a cute and fun way to assemble macaron lollipops.

A really cool way to serve macaron lollipops is to show them off using a display cake. Preferably, the cake and the macarons should be decorated in a similar fashion, so the end result can be served as an attractive table centerpiece with a distinct theme. In this lesson introduces the concept of display cakes, and discusses the various options you have for making and covering them.

Download the recipe book for the topic of creating stunning display cakes for your macarons, which is attached to this lesson. 

In this lesson we’ll focus on creating display cakes, which can be used (among other things) to show off your macaron creations. You’ll learn how to cover and decorate a display cake that matches the design of your macarons.

A brief summary of everything you learned in this course.