I can't tell you how many requests I've received for this classic, but it seems only fitting that it should come up right around the Christmas holiday, when most home bakers are thinking about whipping up something special. Sacher torte is an excellent holiday pastry for several reasons. It's challenging without being overly so, it's satisfying without being over-the-top rich, and it can be made up to five days ahead of time and stored in the fridge without any noticeable sacrifice in quality. A winner all the way around.

I should insert here that this project, while it will be welcomed by many, is being dreaded by some, notably regular reader and contributor Gerhard. I don't think I'm giving too much away by disclosing that Gerhard is an employee of the city of Vienna. When I happened to mention this week's project to him in a friendly email last week, he had a small anxiety attack. Fortunately he's on vacation this week, traveling to a distant locale where he won't have access to the internet. I was deeply flattered that he regarded my attempt at Sacher torte to be a PR crisis of a scale that he momentarily considered staying home. Kinda makes a guy proud.

Anyway, with him out of the way it should be smooth sailing. Let's do it!

Pastry Chef Camille files this report from the Continent:

Funnily enough, I saw a pile of coconut macaroons in a bakery here in Paris yesterday. They were called "congolais." Just thought you'd like to know that even here in macaron land, macaroons do exist. :)

Turns out those Parisians really do have taste!

Toasted coconut is one of the pastrydom's most beautiful sights, I think. These shaggy cookies resemble French macarons only in name, however they are a true pedestrian delight, at least if you like coconut. I think they deserve the royal treatment. Start by tossing your sweetened and unsweetened coconut together with the salt.

Next — and this is an important step — stir your can of cream of coconut. Some of the coconut oil always congeals on top.

Combine all your liquid ingredients together in a medium bowl...

...and give them a good whisk.

Add to the coconut mixture...

...and toss to combine.

Lay heaping tablespoons down on parchment-lined sheet pans (you'll have about 45).

Then with moistened fingertips, go back and form the heaps into rounded mounds.

Bake on high racks at 375 for seven minutes, rotate the pans back to front and top to bottom, and bake seven minutes more, or until the coconut is nicely browned.

If you want to gild the lily a bit, you can dip the flat bottoms of the macarons in a little melted semisweet chocolate, and cool them on parchment. Yow, that's good.

The question of fat was raised yesterday in an email. Specifically, where's the fat in the macaron cookie recipe below? Don't most cookies us butter as a base? The answer is that the fat is in there, just not in the form of dairy fat. The fat that macaroons contain — and they contain a good deal of it — is in the form of coconut oil. Dried coconut flake (or copra as it's called in the bulk grocery biz) is over 70 percent coconut oil. It doesn't seem particularly "oily" to the touch since coconut oil is solid at room temperature. Which begs the question why it isn't just called "fat." All I can say is that somewhere someone decided we'd call fats from plants "oils" and fats from animals "fats." It's not a texture thing, it's a source thing.

Not many of us remember nowadays that coconut oil was once as ubiquitous as vegetable shortening in food. It was in everything from candy to commercial baked goods, and was one of the primary fats in margarine. The reason, because once you refine coconut oil it's almost totally flavorless. That makes it handy as a general-purpose fat: for cooking, for baking, for frying, to spread on your toast...anything. Easy to extract, abundant, cheap, and above all solid at room temperature (a very rare thing for a plant fat), it was the perfect alternative to butter. Except that one day some food scientist somewhere realized that it was rather a bad thing as a regular part of the human diet. Amazingly high in saturated fat, it's artery-clogging potential exceeds that of even the most unhealthful animal fats. And so, quietly, coconut oil began to disappear from ingredient lists, to the point that today it seems like a rare and exotic substance.

A macaroon or two every so often, however, won't do you any harm at all.

Mexico Bob reminds me that in Mexico "coco" is also slang for "head" and also for "ghost" or "boogeyman".

People love to mock the Professor on Gilligan's Island for all his goofy coconut contraptions. I remember one episode where he made a transistor radio, and then there was the time Mr. Howell had those fainting spells, and the Professor built him that coconut shell MRI machine. Sure it was all a little far-fetched, but it underscored a very important point: that the coconut really is one of the world's most versatile plants.

The Sanskrit word for coconut is kalpa vriksha which roughly translates to "everything you really need in life". A coconut provides food (its meat), drink (its water), cooking and/or serving vessels (its shell), fuel to cook with (shells and husks) and building material for a shelter to do your cooking and/or eating in. People use coconut wood to construct houses, thatch to cover roofs and fiber to make mats, rope, brushes and baskets. Of course the coconut palm's utility doesn't stop there. People carve canoes out of them, make musical instruments...the list goes on.

Did you know that coconut water can be used as IV fluid? It's true. The roots can also be used to make clothing dye, tooth brushes and mouthwash. The meat and water can be made into laxatives and curatives for heart conditions, fevers and bladder problems and the oil is an antimicrobial. So you see, the Professor was really onto something with all those inventions of his. I like to think of him as a man ahead of his time.

Opinion is sharply divided on where the coconut originated, though the bulk of the evidence favors Southeast Asia and especially India. Because the coconut seems to have quite a few close relations in Central America, especially in the region of Panama, some cite the New World as its place of origin. But then there are also ancestors/relations in Africa and New Zealand, so it's really hard to know.

What is known for sure is that the coconut does extremely well in the tropics due to all the humidity, and very poorly everywhere else, which is why it grows nowhere in Asia west of India and nowhere north of the Philippines. But that leaves quite a heck of a lot of territory, and with the help of early traders and explorers, notably the Arabs and the Portuguese, the coconut has managed to exploit just about every available land mass, including Central America, the Caribbean and West and East Africa.

It was in fact the Portuguese who named the coconut, "coco" being sailor slang for "monkey face", owing to the three holes (actually germination pores) on its surface.

It was brought to my attention by no less than eleven emailers last night that apples are not drupes. Eight of those further pointed out that coconuts are not the only drupes whose seeds are more desirable than their fruit. Almonds are also drupes, I learned, as is coffee.

What can I say except that I had no idea that the biological sciences were so well represented in the Joe Pastry readership. I thank you all for writing in and keeping me on the straight and narrow. The corrections have been made for posterity.

The coconut isn't actually a nut, but the stone from a type of fruit known as a drupe. Collectively, we eat a lot of drupes. Nectarines, mangoes and olives spring to mind. Yet the coconut is one of only a very few whose seeds are more desirable than their fruit. Not that eating that seed all that easy easy to do. You usually need either a saw, a power drill or a machete to break into one.

The toughness of the coconut is what's thought to be behind it's extraordinary dispersion among islands in the South Pacific. Coconut trees are highly tolerant of salt water, and their shallow roots prefer beach sand. Combine those adaptations with tough fruit that floats like a football and high productivity (some coconut trees can produce 75 fruits a year), and you have one of nature's most effective seed dispersal machines. Fruit that drops off the tree into the surf (or gets carried out by the tide) can float for months at sea and still take root when it washes up on a distant beach. Caribbean coconuts have been found as far away as Norway, still capable of germinating.

All that toughness makes them a bit dangerous too. When you consider that a coconut tree can grow up to 80 feet or more in height and a decent-sized coconut can weigh between four and five pounds, they have some real injury-causing potential. A 4 1/2 pound coconut dropped from 80 feet is traveling in excess of 250 miles per hour by the time it hits the ground, and strikes with a force of just under 2,500 pounds per square inch. Ouch. Fortunately, human heads are pretty tough things themselves (especially among us thick-skulled pastry types). For that reason, death by coconut is rare, far rarer than the 150-per-year statistic Florida state officials once bantered about to make people feel better about shark attacks. Hey, ten times more people die from coconut impacts than shark bites every year, folks. Ah, but then coconuts don't rip your limbs off when you get too close to them, do they governor? That was always my problem with those press conferences.

Still, it's true that concussions from coconuts aren't at all rare in coconut cultivation locales like the Dominican Republic. No wonder people there associate coconuts with madness. Me, I think I'd wear a football helmet everywhere I went.

That's a bit of a toughie. The macaroon springs from the macaron, which means the origination point of the macaroon is somewhere in Italy. The French macaron was developed sometime in the 18th Century, so it's safe to assume that the idea of the macaron/macaroon had pretty well spread around all of Europe by the beginning of the 19th. However while almonds and/or almond flour might have been commonplace in the south of Europe, they were by no means everyday groceries in the North. Almond trees don't grow very well in cool, wet climates, which meant that if more than a few people in, say, the British Isles were going to enjoy the meringue-based sensation known (locally) as the macaroon, they were going to have to find another nut to base it on.

As it happened, an exotic new item was just coming up from the tropics that filled the bill perfectly. That nut wasn't really a nut (as I'll explain in more detail later), it was the giant seed of a tropical palm tree, the so-called coconut. Coconut meat made a big bang among confectioners in England starting in about the mid-1800's, the time when all sorts of strange nutmeats were being brought in by ship from all over the world. It combined perfectly with all that New World sugar that everyone was so excited about. The trouble with coconut was that it didn't ship all that well. The nuts themselves were round and mostly empty on the inside, making them costly items to transport, and when traders tried to extricate the meat and pack it in barrels, they found it spoiled quickly. Thus for several decades coconut only entered Europe in dribs and drabs.

That all changed when a Ceylon-based French company, J.H. Vavasseur & Co., invented a method for shredding and drying coconut, which made it a snap to pack and ship. The European taste for coconut exploded, and by the turn of the 20 Century, the Vavasseur company was shipping in an estimated 60,000 tons of shredded coconut annually. Exactly who first combined some of that coconut with egg whites and sugar to create the modern coconut macaroon is a mystery, however it's thought that it was a Brit, and more than that a Scot. It's been said that coconut macaroons were invented by a confectioner in Glasgow somewhere around the year 1900, though that claim is to my knowledge undocumented. Coconut was starting to catch on in America about that time (we were quite late to the coconut party), so it's possible that it was invented here.

Wherever it was invented, one thing is certain: the true bastion of the cookie-like coconut macaroon is America. Or at any rate that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.

It turns out last week's project was perfectly timed from a marketing standpoint, as Starbucks is preparing to test-market French macarons in many of their stores. To believe the reviews, the macarons are decent if not great. They are, however, very reasonably priced. Whereas macarons in Paris can cost several dollars each, Starbucks will sell you a dozen for $10. Not half bad. Be warned, however, that they'll only be on sale from December 13th until Christmas.

A combination of sweetened and unsweetened coconut creates the ideal texture for these macaroons, neither too dense nor too dry. The cream of coconut (drastically reduced coconut milk) provides the deep coconut flavor. Find cream of coconut either in the baking section of your supermarket, the international food section or the cocktail mixes section (it's most often used to make piña coladas).

7.5 ounces cream of coconut
2 tablespoons honey
4 eggs whites
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon salt
4.5 ounces unsweetened shredded coconut
11 ounces sweetened shredded coconut

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Stir the cream of coconut in the can, then pour 7.5 ounces (a cup) into a bowl. Add the honey, egg whites and vanilla and whisk to combine. Toss together the two kinds of coconut with the salt. Pour the liquid mix over coconut mix and toss to combine. Spoon tablespoons of the batter onto parchment-line sheet pans, then with wet hands, form them into rounded heaps. Bake on upper rackes of the oven for seven minutes. Switch the pans top-to-bottom and rotate, then bake for seven minutes more, until they're golden brown. Cool and eat.

Though I respect macarons, macaroons are much closer to my heart. My grandfather, a man of great dignity and taste, was crazy about them. Here I should insert that a really good macaroon is a rare thing. Too often macaroons are dry, papery and almost completely devoid of real coconut flavor. Thus, most people — quite understandably — avoid them. If you're one of those folks, I hope you'll at least try the recipe I'm going to put up. It'll change your mind about macaroons, I promise.

Macarons wouldn't be macarons if they weren't fussy things. Though they are at their core very simple little cookies, a variety of things can go wrong during their preparation, preventing them from achieving the Platonic ideal. Me, I don't see why that's the end of the world. However I confess that if mine didn't come out as I expected, I'd want to know why. So here are a few common macaron problems and their solutions.

1. No feet. This is very often the result of not allowing macarons to rest long enough before baking. Note here that macarons made via the Italian method don't need to be rested. If your Italian macarons don't have feet, it could be that your oven temperature is too low. Another possibility, of course, is over-mixing. Too many bubbles popped and the macarons didn't have the lift they needed.

2. Cracks. Very often the result of under-mixing. In other words, too many bubbles — too much air — in the macaron. The meringue gets dried out in the oven and cracks appear. Steam escapes and little if any rise occurs.

3. Runny batter. A result of over-mixing. This isn't necessarily a catastrophe. It might simply mean a thin cap with feet underneath. That's well within the bounds of a successful macaron. Bake, cool, fill and declare victory.

4. Feet that protrude sideways. This occurs when your oven is too hot. The batter at the edges of the macaron heats and expands too quickly, then explodes outward. Put the net batch on a lower rack. Some folks like to prop the oven door open slightly with a wooden spoon. The result is more even heat than the typical hot-cold cycling that goes in inside a closed oven.

Those are the biggies. Should you experience any other problems not covered here, send me an email and I'll do my best to help.

Given that so many of the world's great epicures now regard the macaron with the kind of reverence that was once reserved for the communion wafer, it only seems fitting to open this tutorial with a prayer. As we prepare to undertake this mystery, let us acknowledge our failures and ask the Lord for pardon and strength. Amen.

Now then, to business. What I'm about to demonstrate is the classic French method for making macarons. There's another method, called the "Italian" method because it employs Italian meringue. The French method, I think, is more straightforward if not as adaptable for incorporating exotic flavors.

Begin by arraying your ingredients. Those of you who are familiar with macarons will note that whereas most macaron recipes call for almond flour, I'm using slivered, blanched almonds. There are two reasons for this. First, because almond flour and/or meal aren't commonly available in America, even in specialty shops. And second, even when you can find one or the other, you can never be sure how old they are. Nut oil is critical to the success of a macaron, but it can go rancid and/or solidify over time. The best way to ensure freshness is to grind your own in the food processor. As you can see above, the homemade stuff will give you a slightly knobbly texture, so if you're really serious about macarons, order almond powder or flour or meal fresh from a good online resource. Here I have:

3.8 ounces blanched almonds
7 ounces powdered sugar
3.5 ounces egg whites (aged overnight at room temperature)
1.75 ounces granulated sugar

Start by grinding your almonds and powdered sugar together in a food processor. This is a good idea even if you're using pre-ground almond meal or flour, since it'll aerate it, mix it well with the sugar and reduce the particles to the smallest possible size.

This is about the best I can do with my machine:

Next, prepare a pastry bag, fitting it with just the coupler, no tip.

Stand it up in a tall glass for easy loading.

Now to make the batter. Put the egg whites in the bowl of a mixer fitted with a whip. This is a good point to add a few drops of coloring if you want to.

Whip to about the soft peak stage.

With the machine running, add the granulated sugar and whip to stiff peaks: the "bird's beak" stage, like this:

Next add your almond/sugar mixture...just dump it in.

Now, without regard to consequences, stir the mixture together. Don't fold at this point — stir. Because remember, this isn't spongecake. Part of the point is to break some of these bubbles. If the batter's too light it'll dry out in the oven and crack. That'll let the steam out and bye bye feet. So don't be delicate, stir for maybe 30 seconds. (Be sure to scrape the sides as you go).

When the batter is about to this point, you want to start folding (find instructions on how to fold under the Techniques menu). Fold four or five times, then start testing the batter for readiness.

How to do that? Why, with a spoon of course. You just scoop up a small portion of the batter and plop it onto a plate or sheet pan. What you're after is a small mass that settles down into a nice disk after a few seconds, but with a subtle peak in the center. About like this:

If your batter mounds up too high, go back and fold a few more times. If you over-fold a little and the batter runs a bit, that won't be the end of the world. Contrary to what you may have heard, a few extra strokes is unlikely to ruin your macarons. The biggest mistake most people make with macaron batter is that they baby it too much. I've said it before and I'll say it again: pastries can smell fear. Confidence is key.

Once you've arrived at the right texture, spoon the batter into your pastry bag, and start piping onto a parchment-lined sheet.

You want small disks — smaller than you may imagine — only about an inch and a half in diameter. Now then, here's perhaps the most important tip I have to pass on: let your macarons rest. For how long? About half an hour will suffice, though you can leave them up to about 50 minutes if you want. What will this do? It will allow the skins of the macarons to dry out. That will make them inflexible, constraining the rise as the macaron heats. With nowhere else to go, the expanding interior of the macaron will be forced downward, which will push the cap up, and the result will be feet. See?

You'll want to bake your macarons on a lower-middle rack of a 300 oven (you can get it preheating while the piped macarons sit) for about twelve minutes. Let them cool for a minimum of half an hour, then gently peel the parchment off the backs.

Grasping one meringue, apply the filling of your choice. Nothing exotic here, just raspberry jam. But oh, I do love it so.

Apply the top and your task is complete. Repeat until all your sandwiches are assembled.

And with that, this tutorial is ended. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord, make macarons, and brag about it.

This is something else you hear an awful lot about in regard to macarons. What we call "aged eggs" French pastry chefs simply call "eggs", since they tend not to refrigerate theirs. They just get them very fresh, use them relatively quickly, and order more. Here we're a little more uptight about maintaining egg freshness, which I don't think is all bad. However it does put us at something of a disadvantage when it comes to whipping up egg foams.

Why? Because as eggs age, their whites get runnier. This doesn't effect they way they taste or cook up, but it does affect the way they whip. Thin liquids can simply be agitated more briskly than thick ones. A whip will cut through a bowl full of water with much more force than it will through a bowl full of honey, if you follow me. That extra force, when applied to egg proteins, means a higher froth.

Being a skeptic by nature, I'm not totally convinced that aged eggs make that big a difference in a macaron batter. After all, part of making a macaron batter is popping a good deal of those bubbles. However aged egg advocates may have a point in that foams made from old eggs probably have a higher proportion of small bubbles in them, and those may make a contribution to the macaron's subtle rise.

Age your egg whites by putting them in a bowl, covering the bowl with plastic wrap, and leaving the bowl out on the counter for about 24 hours. At room temperature, eggs age one day per hour compared to how they'd age in a refrigerator. By morning those whites will be good and runny, but will not have spoiled. Oh, and don't fall for the myth that you can achieve the same effect by microwaving your whites for ten seconds or so. That may warm the whites, but won't have any effect at all on their viscosity.

I've been catching a lot of flak the last many months for not having a presence on Facebook. I've resisted it, frankly, because I have no idea what I'll actually do there. Today I can finally say to those of you who've been so adamant about it: you win. I've secured a Facebook page and will do my utmost to live up to the responsibilities entailed therein.

Ask that same experienced gourmand I referenced down below about what distinguishes the perfect macaron, and he'll tell you that the most important feature of a good macaron is its "foot." What are "feet" in the context of macarons? They're the rough, uneven bits on either side of the filling, the bottoms of the disks when they bake up on the sheet. Who ever decided that a macaron must have a foot in order to be great? Who knows? But somebody did, and now we're all stuck with it. (I'll have you know, however, that my grandmother's meatloaf has a distinguishing feature along its edge that I refer to as "the elbow", the secret to which I shall never divulge). Getting those feet is the obsession of modern macaron makers, as it is an emblem of both skill and cultural awareness. God knows I like to exhibit both of those things as often as I can. So let's talk feet!

The "foot" of a macaron — as unsightly and uneven as it may appear to the untrained eye — is a factor of the macaron's rising. The smooth "cap" on the top of the cookie is how it appears when it's initially piped onto the sheet pan. If a macaron is prepared correctly, that cap will hold its shape, immobile and without cracking, as it heats in the oven. Of course the interior of the macaron is a foam, containing countless bubbles of moisture-laden air. When the air inside those bubbles heats up, they bubbles are going to want to expand. But expand to where? If the cap that surrounds the macaron won't budge, they'll have nowhere to go but down. That downward force pushes the cap up, revealing the randomly formed interior of the macaron, otherwise known as the "foot." Not too complicated really. Anyone who's ever launched a water rocket as a child can see what's going on here. But how to create that effect? Better to show you in a tutorial, I think.

Another very good question, since a recipe for macarons — practically speaking — can be as few as four or five lines long. Strange then that most magazine features on macarons go on for pages as authors labor to explain the picayune nuances of getting a macaron just right. Some of them get downright mystical. Turn your bowl of stiffened egg whites upside down for five seconds. Knock your sheet pans together three times. Stand on one foot while reciting Pierre Hermé's middle name backwards twice. So OK, I made that last one up, but only to underscore how downright comical these recipes can be. Read them and several things become abundantly clear. Primarily, that there's a broad and unhealthy obsession with creating the "perfect" Hermé macaron. Second, that there's very little understanding among most home bakers about what macarons are and how they work.

As I've mentioned, macarons are simple meringue cookies, not unlike the little meringues that many of us grew up with. You know, those little blobs of sweetened egg white foam, often studded with chocolate chips. They're great. What makes macarons different is that they contain a high amount of ground nuts, which introduce a good deal of oil into the egg white foam and in the process create a very different texture: a shiny, eggshell-thin crust which yields to a soft and slightly gooey interior.

As I've discussed exhaustively in the past, foam and fat are natural enemies. Put a little oil or fat into a bowl with unbeaten egg whites and you'll have a job whipping the mix up into a stable foam. The reason in a nutshell: because fat molecules compete with protein molecules on the surfaces of air bubbles, undermining the fairly stable "films" that egg proteins create, and which hold the foam up. However there's nothing that says you can't add fat after you've whipped an egg white foam up, for once the protein meshes have formed, they do a pretty good job of crowding out the fat molecules, keeping the bubbles from popping. This is the science behind soufflées, buttercreams...and macarons.

Macarons (at least in the French version of the recipe) begin with an egg white foam to which sugar is added, both to sweeten and stabilize it. Once this basic meringue is created, a mixture of ground nuts (classically almonds) or nut flour are added, along with more sugar. The mixture is then folded together until the right consistency — not too stiff, not too runny — is arrived at. This step, according to most recipe writers, is the where all the magic and mystery is in the perfect macaron. I'm not necessarily denying it, however I will say that there's more to a successful macaron than just the mixing, as I'll discuss in the next post.

That question from reader Phil H., and it's good one. The thing is, in most of the English-speaking world, the term "petit four" refers to a very specific thing. That being a small, layered cake covered with poured fondant. Among the French, however, the term refers to an entire family of small sweets. The word "petit four" is thus used in the same way we might use the term "appetizer."

In France, petits fours come in two types, "iced" (petits fours glacés) and "dry" (petits fours secs). The little cakes we know as petits fours fall into the former category, and macaroons — along with cookies and small, laminated pastries — fall into the latter.