Macarons

Ground almonds and icing sugar, blitzed together with half your egg whites into a thick paste, is doing one job: making sure no sugar crystal or almond lump survives to tear a hole in the shell's surface later. Sieve the almonds before this — not for show, for the same reason, any gritty bit becomes a weak point the air pushes through when it bakes. If your almonds are coarse or a touch oily (cheap pre-ground almonds often are), that's fine for crumbles, wrong here; buy the fine blanched kind if you can, or grind your own in short pulses and sieve out what won't pass.

The syrup brought to 118°C is the part people fear and the part that actually forgives you most. What's happening: you're cooking sugar to a concentration where, poured hot into whisked egg white, it instantly scalds and sets the protein structure mid-whip — that's what gives a macaron meringue its gloss and its stability, versus a plain whisked meringue which is softer and collapses faster. No thermometer, no panic: at that stage syrup dropped into cold water forms a soft ball you can roll between fingers, still pliable, not hard. That old test still works when your thermometer's battery doesn't.

Folding the meringue into the almond paste — this is where most trays go wrong, and it's not about counting strokes, whatever anyone tells you. You're looking for a ribbon: lift the spatula, the batter falls back into itself and the ridge disappears into the surface within several seconds, not instantly, not sitting there stiff. Underfold and you get lumpy, domed shells with no shine. Overfold and the batter runs thin, spreads past your 3cm circle before it skins, and you lose the foot entirely because there's no structure left to hold shape while it bakes. This is feel, not time — thirty folds for one person's wrist is forty for another's.

Baking at 160°C fan for about ten minutes is a lower bound, not a target — pull one off the paper at ten minutes and look underneath: if it lifts clean, sturdy, with a dry foot visible around the rim, you're there; if it tears or the inside's still wet-looking through a crack, give it another minute or two. Ovens lie about their own number constantly, especially small domestic ones with hot spots — rotate the tray halfway if yours runs uneven, which most do.

Cooling fully on the paper before peeling isn't fussiness either — warm shells are still setting their internal structure, and a shell lifted too early tears its base off, stuck to the paper, because the inside hasn't finished drying into that slightly chewy, not-wet crumb you want. Patience here costs you nothing but ten more minutes of not touching them, which is the hardest ingredient in this whole recipe.

For the fillings: salted caramel needs nothing from me you don't already know — sugar cooked to a deep amber before the cream goes in, salt to cut the sweetness that would otherwise be relentless against an already-sweet shell. The raspberry buttercream is butter creamed with yolk and a reduced raspberry-sugar syrup plus freeze-dried raspberry powder for colour and punch without adding wet juice that would split the butter — if you can't get freeze-dried raspberry powder, a spoon of good raspberry jam reduced down works, though you lose some of that sharp true-fruit hit. Any neutral food colouring paste works for the shells — gel or paste, not liquid, which adds water you don't want anywhere near this batter; a few drops too much liquid colouring and you've thinned your ribbon stage without meaning to.

This recipe makes eighty halves, so forty finished macarons if you sandwich evenly — plenty for a gathering, or a tin that outlasts a week of tea breaks if you keep them in the fridge and let them come back to room temperature before eating, which also, incidentally, is when the filling and shell marry properly and stop tasting like two separate things sitting next to each other.