Preheat your oven to 310°F.

Add 75g of reduced aquafaba to your mixer’s bowl along with your cream of tartar or vinegar. Turn the mixer up to medium high speed. You want to get it to soft peaks. That means that when you lift the whisk out of the fluff, it forms little mountains that fall over and wiggle a lot. They remind me of the waves in Japanese art.

While your fluff is fluffing, pour your granulated sugar into your clean saucepan along with 1/4 cup of water and put it over medium low heat. Do not stir. Add your thermometer – making sure the actual thermometer doesn’t touch the bottom of the pan but sits in the middle of your sugar mixture. We want to bring this to 245°F. I set my target temp for 225°F so that I can check my aquafaba fluff to see if it’s at soft peaks yet. If it’s not, I turn the heat down to low under the sugar and kick the mixer speed up by one.

While waiting on all of this to happen, measure out your dry ingredients. Use your spatula to push 200g of powdered sugar and 200g of almond flour through your sieve into a large mixing bowl. Give it a good stir with your spatula until they look well combined.

Once your sugar reaches 245°F, take it to your fluff and slowly pour it in while the mixer is on medium. Don’t worry about the sugar that sticks to the sides of the bowl. Turn the mixer back up to medium high and let it go until the outside of the bowl feels cool to the touch. At this point, the meringue should be glossy and white and it will be ribbony and sticky when you lift the whisk out of it.

Pour in the remaining 75g of aquafaba into the dry mix and combine it well.

Remove the mixer bowl, and using your spatula move 1/2 of the meringue into your marzipan, being careful not to grab any of the candied sugar one the sides of the bowl. Stir it until it’s mixed well and you don’t see any white meringue or chunks of marzipan.

Add the rest of your meringue into your almond mixture – again, being careful not to grab any of the candy bits on the side of the bowl. Tilt your bowl 3/4 on its side so that the batter slides down from the bottom of the bowl and rests along the side. This way, gravity is going to help us with the folding.

Use your spatula to scrape along from the top of the bowl, around the side, around the bottom, and back up the other side to the top of the the bowl. You should be cleanly picking up the whole mixture and folding it over onto itself. Do this gently until everything is incorporated. The batter should be relatively thick at this point. If you want to add gel color, you can do it now. You can add up to a teaspoon and it shouldn’t affect the macarons.

Now, alternate between smushing the batter along the sides of the bowl and scraping and folding – slowly and gently, until you can lift the batter with the spatula and draw a figure 8 with the batter that falls off. Once you can do this, STOP. Your batter is done.

Line a tall glass with your prepared piping bag/tip (just like a bag in a trash can). If using a tip, I like to twist the bag just above the tip and smush the twist down into the tip. This prevents batter from leaking out. Pour your batter into the bag and either twist or tie it closed. There should be enough batter to fill the bag two or three times. Cover what’s left in the bowl so that it doesn’t dry out.

Grab your prepped baking pan lined with a silicone mat (or parchment if you haven’t gotten a mat yet, but remember you may have to adjust your baking time and your cookies won’t come out as perfect circles).

Holding the piping bag perfectly perpendicular (up and down) to the baking pan, gently squeeze until you’ve made a circle about an inch in diameter. Stop squeezing, and quickly make a small circle with the piping tip as you lift it. This will prevent your macarons from having nipples.

Pipe your next macaron about 2.5″ from your first one. Continue until you’ve filled your tray.

Slam the tray down on a flat surface to bring all the bubbles up and out of your macs. I like to do it two or three times on one side of the tray, rotate, another two or three times, rotate, so on and so forth until I feel like the bubbles are all gone. I probably hit the tray around 20-30 times. If you have stubborn bubbles, you can pop them with a toothpick, clean sewing needle, or cookie scribe.

Set your tray on a flat surface and wait for the macarons to form a dry skin. This is imperative because without the skin, the macarons will probably explode in the oven. This skin keeps all the steam inside the cookie and allows them to lift and form feet. I like to set mine on the (now cool) stovetop with the exhaust fan running above them.

Once you see that the cookies are no longer shiny and you can lightly run your finger along the surface without it sticking to you, set a timer for 20 minutes. Once that goes off, put your cookies into the oven on the lowest rack (if using parchment, you may need to use the middle rack). 

Bake the macarons for 20 minutes. If your oven has hot spots, rotate the tray at around 12 minutes.

After 20 minutes, pull the tray out and set it on a cooling rack. Do not attempt to remove your macarons yet! Wait until they are totally cool, and they should peel right off. If they don’t, pop the tray in the freezer for 3-5 minutes and then they will.

Find matching pairs and fill with whatever your heart desires.

Put into an airtight container and IF YOU CAN, place them into the fridge for at least 24 hours before enjoying.

This recipe makes between 70 and 85 shells depending on how large you pipe them. They can be put into an airtight container and refrigerated up to a week and frozen for up to six months.