Toasted Coconut Macaroons

Hey everyone,
So I'm on a roll here with cookies. I think the one person who would probably love me at this point (apart from the nurses and staff at the hospital), would be this character.

I mean this lovable guy loves cookies and who can argue with that? Last week, I had the amazing mini chocolate chip cookies, which is the traditional Cookie Monster cookie. I hope I can tweak tradition and convince him to have these equally delectable treats....

Toasted Coconut Macaroons


So, this cookie had been on my to-do list for a very very long time. I love coconut and if it weren't for the fact that I'd have really high cholestrol if I ate this everyday, I'd be eating this everyday.

The macaroon is extremely simple to make and I actually have a few ideas to help. The recipe in itself is the one I used from Joyofbaking.com, which is great.

1. I doubled the recipe but didn't change the amount of sugar (so 1 cup sugar to 8 egg whites).
2. The recipe doesn't call for toasted coconut, but I made a mix - 4 cups of untoasted coconut with 2 cups of toasted coconut and you can do it on the stove top.
3. I baked these cookies for a few minutes over the recommended 20 minutes - to make it more crispy.

Other useful tips:

Make your own double boiler.
Usually you see chefs using complicated tools for this, and if you have it, then that's great. But if you are like me and have pots and pans of different sizes, it's a problem. So here's what I ended up doing:

I had a saucepan with some water. I put a glass plate on top. Then I put a metallic bowl on top of that, which had the egg whites and sugar and I stirred it till it warmed up and dissolved the sugar. Here is my "invention" : (I'm quite proud of myself)

And it works!

After the sugar dissolves into the egg whites, you add the other ingredients and mix:

I let the batter chill for a few hours and it really helped scoop out the cookies. I made small cookies and I got about 36 of them even with the doubling of the recipe.

These cookies were amazing. Light and airy and relatively healthy, since I cut the sugar back and egg whites and coconut are the main ingredients here.

All in all, relatively easy to make. Here's what my cookies looked like:

Just out of the oven:

Final batch of cookies:

Staff loved these cookies as well. Now it begs the question of how I'm actually going to top this.

Maybe another cookie......?

Kartik