Lucrece Matoug fell in love with macarons when, aged 18, she visited a celebrated Parisian patisserie on the Champs-Elysees.
Entranced by the intricate and delicate almond cakes – and the burst of flavour from the sweet filling, Lucrece made a vow.
“I was like, wow!” she remembers. “I want to know how to do that.”
Fast forward to late last year and the 35-year-old’s friends do a blind taste test – a box of macarons from the Parisian patisserie versus a batch freshly made by Lucrece.
The result?
“Mine won,” she says, with a glimmer of a smile. “I couldn’t believe it.”
The result may have surprised Lucrece. But it didn’t surprise her friends.
The HR specialist from Versailles, just outside of Paris, has been perfecting the art of the macaron since that fateful day on the Champs Elysee.
Alongside a professional career that has taken her all over the world, including to the Republic of Congo as a journalist and development worker and now to Aberdeen, Lucrece has been baking and making macarons.
Initially, they were for friends and family. But recently, they have been for her own patisserie, called Loulou Macaron, which she started while living in Houston, Texas, with her husband David.
That was after Lucrece saw in Texan bakeries something that in France might earn you the guillotine – macarons made with cream cheese!
“I wasn’t offended,” she says with visible restraint. “But I was definitely surprised.”
A return to Aberdeen in January last year – Lucrece and David lived in the city from 2013 to 2018 – mothballed the Loulou project for a few months.
But thanks to the backing of her friends, and their blind taste test, she’s found the confidence to restart Loulou Macaron and bring her own slice of Parisian elegance to the Granite City.
“Everyone who likes something good will enjoy them,” says Lucrece, who runs the business from her kitchen in Cults, and through the Loulou Macaron Instagram page.
“They are quite different from what you can find around.”
What do the macarons from Loulou taste like? We find out
To check out Lucrece’s claims, I’m doing my own taste test.
I’m not on the Champs-Elysees – I’m in The P&J’s office on the slightly less celebrated Broad Street.
Furthermore, I don’t have any world-famous macarons on hand to compare. But if they are better than Lucrece’s then I’m booking the next plane to Paris. Because hers are sensational.
My favourite is caramel with salted butter, which has a salty zing that leaps into the mouth.
But there are delights everywhere. The pink rose-flavoured macaron tastes as good as it looks, and the coffee flavour packs a punch.
At £1 each, plus a pound for the packaging, the macarons are nobody’s idea of cheap. But macarons never are, such is the work that goes into them.
A box of 12 from that Paris patisserie, for example, sells for £30.
‘There are a hundred ways of ruining them’
Lucrece’s skills are all the more impressive as macarons are notoriously difficult to make. They are as much a chemistry experiment as a culinary one.
The oven has to be at just the right temperature for the meringue, the piped filling the exact amount, the ingredients spot on.
“There are a hundred ways of ruining them,” Lucrece says.
Then there is the seven-minute wait while they sit in the oven.
“You are just praying that they will lift,” Lucrece explains.
So what does she think makes for a perfect macaron?
“It shouldn’t be crunchy, it should be chewy,” she says. “And then you should feel the flavor immediately – like an explosion of flavor.”
Indeed, while some of the appeal of macarons is their bright colours, Lucrece says they should taste as good as they look.
Recently, she’s seen lots of macarons on Instagram that she can tell are overbaked. They may look good on social media, but she wouldn’t want to eat one.
“For them to taste as good as a look, you need to put some time in that,” she continues. “Not just for the picture, but for the taste.”
Loulou Macaron can be found on Instagram.
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