Baking paper will do. Plenty of good macarons have been piped onto a sheet of parchment with circles drawn on the back in pencil. If you’ve already got a roll in the drawer and you’re making one batch for a Christmas box, you don’t need to buy anything.
The reason people end up with a mat is that macarons are fussy in ways most biscuits aren’t. Every shell has to be the same size so the pairs match up, and paper can curl at the corners or lift in the fan of the oven. A mat with the circles already printed on it sorts out the first problem, and its weight sorts out the second.
Where a mat actually helps
The dot in the centre of each circle is the useful bit. Hold the piping bag straight up over it, squeeze until the batter reaches the inner line, then stop and flick away. After a tray or two you stop thinking about it. With paper, you’re squinting at faint pencil marks through the sheet while trying to stop the corners curling up.
Mats also make it easier to bang the tray on the worktop before resting the shells, which knocks out air bubbles. Paper can slide about when you do that.
And they last. Paper gets binned after each batch, whereas a mat goes back in the drawer. I’ve written more about the general trade-off in whether silicone mats beat baking paper.
Which mat, then?
The Super Kitchen macaron mat set gives you three mats. Two are full size at 42 x 29.5cm (one red, one blue) and the grey one is smaller, 29.2 x 21.6cm. All three have rows of printed circles with a dot in the middle, and the grey mat’s circles are noticeably bigger, so you get a choice of two shell sizes.
The listing says they’re food-grade silicone over fibreglass and fine from -40 to 230°C. They’re also dishwasher, freezer and microwave safe.
One thing to check before ordering: 42cm is a fairly big mat. Measure your baking trays first. A mat that rides up the sides of a smaller tray won’t sit flat, and you want it flat for this.
Where it won’t save you
A mat can’t fix the batter. Most failed macarons come down to the meringue or the folding. Fold too little and they crack, fold too much and they spread into flat puddles, and no printed circle will hold them in. Oven temperature matters just as much, and most home ovens run hotter or cooler than the dial says. An oven thermometer is honestly a better first buy if your shells come out brown or hollow.
Silicone also browns a little more gently than paper on a hot tray, which is generally a good thing here. But it can mean your shells need a minute or two longer. Do one test tray before you commit a whole batch.
My take: if you’re trying macarons once, use paper and a pencil. If you’ve had a go, liked it and want them to look neat enough to give away, a mat with guides is a cheap way to take one variable out of a recipe that has too many. Wash it in warm soapy water rather than scrubbing it, and keep sharp knives off it.
