10 Fall Macarons You’Re Gonna Love

Macarons get treated like a test you either pass or fail.

That’s the shells talking, and the shells have nothing to do with flavor.

Everything that makes one of these taste like fall lives in the filling.

Which is the forgiving half, the one you can taste and fix and taste again.

I’d take a cracked shell around a good spiced buttercream over a flawless one around plain vanilla.

Ten flavors below, with a pin for each so you can see what you’re aiming for.

1. Pumpkin Spice Macarons

Canned puree is what wrecks most of these.

It’s mostly water, and a macaron shell has no room for water.

Leave the puree out of the batter and build the pumpkin into the buttercream, or use a few drops of pumpkin spice extract and skip the puree entirely.

Dry spice is the exception: cinnamon, ginger, clove and nutmeg go straight into the shells if you sift them through with the almond flour, twice.

Weigh the almond flour and sugar on a digital kitchen scale, because macaron recipes are written in grams for a reason.

The pin is Posh Little Designs’ pumpkin pie macarons, which put all the pumpkin in the frosting and hide a baked pie crust cutout in the middle of each one.

2. Apple Cinnamon Macarons

Apple butter, not applesauce.

It’s already cooked down to a paste, so two tablespoons flavor a whole batch of buttercream without thinning it.

Cool it all the way down first, because warm apple butter melts butter on contact and you’ll be starting over.

Fill the piping bag halfway, hold it straight down, and stop squeezing before the batter reaches the edge of the circle.

It spreads on its own.

Everything Marina’s apple cinnamon macarons, pinned above, do use applesauce, but she sets it into a confit with pectin first, which is the other way to get the water out.

3. Maple Pecan Macarons

Maple syrup is thin, and thin is the enemy of buttercream.

Simmer half a cup down to two tablespoons and let it come back to room temperature before it goes anywhere near the butter.

Buy real Grade A dark maple syrup for this, since pancake syrup is corn syrup with coloring and it’ll taste like it.

Toast the pecan halves at 350 for eight minutes and set one on top of each finished macaron, stuck down with a dab of the filling.

The recipe behind the pin, Food Duchess’s maple pecan macarons, skips the reducing and uses maple extract in both the meringue and the buttercream, then dips the tops in a maple glaze and crushed pecans.

4. Salted Caramel Macarons

This is the one I’d make first.

Straight caramel runs out the sides within an hour of filling.

Beat it into buttercream and it stays put, and you still taste caramel.

Butter at true room temperature, whipped pale for a good five minutes, then the cooled caramel goes in a spoonful at a time.

Maldon flaky salt goes on at the end, onto the filling or straight onto the shells, not into the caramel pot, so you hit salt in bites instead of everywhere at once.

Sticky fillings are miserable to wash out of a good bag, which is what Wilton 12-inch disposable decorating bags are for.

For a full recipe, Barley & Sage’s salted caramel macarons do the buttercream ring with half a teaspoon of straight caramel in the center.

5. Chai Tea Macarons

Loose tea never dissolves and you end up with grit in a very expensive cookie.

Use chai tea powder and whisk it into the confectioners’ sugar before it meets the butter.

One batch of meringue is well within what a KitchenAid hand mixer can handle, as long as you keep walking it around the bowl so the whites at the edge catch up.

Let the mat cool all the way down before you pipe the second tray.

A warm mat keeps the skin from forming, and no skin means no feet.

Pies and Tacos’ chai macarons keep every bit of spice in the buttercream and dust the shells only after baking, because cinnamon on raw shells can flatten the rise.

6. Cranberry Orange Macarons

Cranberries go in cooked and strained.

Simmer them with a little sugar until they burst, push it through a fine-mesh sieve to lose the skins, then keep reducing until it mounds on a spoon.

Orange comes in as zest only, because the juice will thin the filling and you’ll spend the rest of the afternoon chasing it with more sugar.

Color with AmeriColor gel food coloring added to the meringue at soft peaks.

Liquid coloring is basically tinted water and it’ll break your batter.

The pin is The Floral Apron’s cranberry orange macarons, built for leftover cranberry sauce: an orange buttercream ring with half a teaspoon of sauce dropped into the middle.

7. Gingerbread Macarons

Molasses is dark, wet and acidic, and it belongs in the filling.

A tablespoon in the buttercream reads as gingerbread, and the same tablespoon in the shell batter reads as a puddle.

A teaspoon of gingerbread spice mix sifted in with the dry ingredients is about the ceiling, and past that the extra powder dries the shells out and they crack.

Keeping the molasses out means the shells bake up pale, so peel back a corner of the mat and check the underside instead of waiting for the tops to color.

The safest full recipe is Chelsweets’ gingerbread macarons: all the molasses and all the spice in the buttercream, shells colored with brown gel and nothing else.

8. Pecan Pie Macarons

You can’t swap pecans in for the almonds.

Pecans carry far more oil, the ground nuts go greasy, and the shells never dry.

So the pecan stays in the filling and the shell stays almond, with crumbs scattered over the piped tops before they dry as the one exception.

Use blanched superfine almond flour, sift it, and throw out whatever refuses to go through.

Toast pecan pieces and chop them fine before they go into a brown sugar buttercream, because big pieces tear the shell when you bite down.

Artisanal Touch Kitchen’s pecan pie macarons, pinned above, are a filling recipe: 120 grams of finely chopped pecans stirred into a homemade caramel, for whatever shell recipe you already trust.

9. Caramel Apple Macarons

Caramel apple is the fussy one here, and the one people ask for again.

Pipe a ring of apple buttercream around the edge of the shell and drop a thick caramel into the middle of it, so you get both flavors separately in the same bite.

Beating the caramel straight into the apple buttercream and piping it as one is the easier version, and nobody will complain.

Cold caramel hitting room-temperature butter will split the buttercream, and it looks ruined for about a minute.

Leave the mixer running and it comes back together.

The pin is the show-off version, an airbrushed apple, and the flavor works just as well on a plain shell.

Pies and Tacos’ caramel apple macarons solve it from the apple side, cooking chopped apples down with brown sugar and cornstarch into a jam thick enough to sit next to a salted caramel buttercream.

10. Hazelnut Praline Macarons

Praline paste is toasted hazelnuts and caramelized sugar, blended until it turns glossy.

You can buy hazelnut praline paste ready made, and for one batch that’s the sane option.

If you make it, blend in short bursts, because a few seconds too long turns it into an oil slick.

Add the paste to the buttercream last, on the lowest speed your mixer has, since beating it hard separates the oil back out.

Fill these a day ahead if you can, because praline needs the night in the fridge more than the rest of them do.

The pin is Krish The Baker’s chocolate hazelnut macarons, which grind 60 grams of hazelnuts into the shells with the almond flour and fill with a Nutella ganache, the shortcut version of praline.

Hazelnuts carry less oil than pecans, so a partial swap in the shell works here where it wouldn’t with pecans.

For seven more, the cozy fall macaron flavors post covers brown sugar cinnamon, s’mores, cinnamon roll, cranberry white chocolate, espresso, Biscoff and eggnog.

And if you’re making a tray of these you’ll want something to drink while they rest, which is where the fall pumpkin coffee recipes come in.