Latest / The Monégasque Table / Can You Put Edible Glitter on Macarons Before Baking?
Transcript
- Dana: First time making macarons. 40 shells, 2 days of my life, and I decided at the last second to brush gold onto them after they cooled. They went from macarons to wet cardboard in about 90 seconds. Margaux: Welcome to The Monégasque Table. This is Ask the Table, and today's question is the one that would have saved those 40 shells: can you put edible glitter on macarons before you bake them? Dana: Please say yes. Margaux: Here's the answer up front: yes, and before is the better moment. Decorating guidance for this is consistent — the dense piped batter holds glitter applied before baking, and the shimmer bakes right in. A piped shell is wet, and wet is the only thing this powder ever needs. So you pipe, you dust, you let them sit, and they go in the oven already finished. Dana: And the oven doesn't cook the sparkle off. Margaux: It can't get near it. The mineral this powder is built on melts around 3000 degrees Celsius. A macaron oven is not in the same conversation. Dana: Then explain my wet cardboard, because I want to know exactly which decision did that. Margaux: The liquid. To get dust onto a finished shell you have to bring some tack back to a surface that has none, and the guidance for macarons is explicit that the carrier has to be alcohol, not water — high-proof and clear, so it flashes off. Water on a baked macaron shell doesn't reactivate anything. It soaks in, and a shell that absorbs water goes soft, or worse. Dana: So the same mistake as royal icing. Margaux: The same family of mistake, with a different villain each time. On dried royal icing, water pits the surface, so decorators use alcohol there too. On dried fondant, water is exactly right — it brings the tack back and nothing is harmed. 3 surfaces, 3 different answers, and the reason people think this category is unreliable is that they carry one habit across all 3. Dana: Right, my round, and I think it's the one that matters more than any of this. You are telling a first-time macaron baker to add a step before the bake. Macarons already fail for 9 reasons nobody can identify. If I dust the shells and the tray comes out cracked, I will never know whether it was the glitter, and I'll blame the glitter. That is a genuinely bad thing to recommend to a beginner. Margaux: That's the round you win, and the fix costs nothing: dust half the tray. Pipe the whole batch, dust one half, leave the other half plain, bake them together. If both halves crack, it was never the glitter. If only the dusted half cracks, you've learned something real in one bake instead of guessing across 4. One variable at a time is how you'd test anything, and a macaron tray is unusually good at it because you get 2 experiments per bake. Dana: Which jar, for shells? Margaux: The fine one. Luster dust runs 5 to 25 microns, so it settles into the surface and reads as a sheen across the whole shell. Flake glitter runs 50 to 500 microns — it sits on top, and a macaron shell is smooth and domed, so a big flake has nothing to hold onto and ends up in the bottom of the box. Use flake if you're scattering a few points of light on the filling edge, not if you want the shell itself to glow. Dana: How much? Margaux: Barely any. The only serving figure printed on these listings is the drinks one — 0.1 grams, about 100 servings from a 10 gram jar — and while that isn't a measured macaron dose, it's the right sense of scale. A tray is a pinch through a small sieve, held high, so it falls rather than lands. Dana: Who should skip it? Margaux: 2 skips. If you are on your first ever batch and the shells themselves aren't working yet, skip the glitter until they are — fix one problem at a time and the glitter is the easy one to add later. And if your macarons are going into a gift box that will be carried around, dust before baking rather than after, because anything applied to a finished shell has a chance of ending up on the tissue paper. Dana: Dana's Scorecard. I came in with 40 ruined shells and a grudge. Where I landed. One: before baking is the answer — piped batter is wet, wet holds glitter, and the shimmer bakes in. Two: after baking, the carrier is high-proof alcohol and never water, which is what I did wrong. Three: it's the opposite instruction from fondant, where water is correct, so I'm going to stop treating these surfaces as one surface. Four: dust half the tray so a bad bake can't be blamed on the wrong thing. My caveat: this is decorators' craft guidance rather than anything tested in a lab, and macarons remain a personal enemy. Margaux: Both fair. The footnote: the MONÉGASQUE 10 gram drink glitters are on Amazon at $14.99 for the scatter, and the 7 gram luster dusts are the fine ones if what you want is a whole shell that glows. Dana: Next time, the surface I use more than all of these put together. Does shimmer survive on piped buttercream, or does it just sink in and disappear? Margaux: It depends on the fat and on how long you wait, and both halves of that are fixable. Quick note before we go — this show is produced by the team at Monégasque, with AI-crafted hosts, and every number you heard was checked by humans against the documents. See you at the table.