I’d dreamt about it for months. If I’m honest, I’d started to think it would never happen. I was this close to throwing in the towel. Then suddenly, it all came together. Just when I thought it was all over, I snuck one past the keeper in the final minute. And there it was: a perfect macaroon, made by me. Small and yellow and lemon-scented. Just thinking about it makes me want to cry. Yes, okay, you can stop sniggering at the back. I know 40-year-old straight men aren’t meant to get all tearful about miniature, pastel-coloured patisserie. On a scale of macho to Madame Jojo’s, being a macaroon-fancier probably falls somewhere between Dale Winton and Larry Grayson. But I can’t help it – I’m obsessed. A few months ago, I was just an ordinary bloke. Now, I’m a contender for patisserie ponce of the year.

In mitigation, I should point out that perfect macaroons are one of the high peaks of baking achievement. You can forget your fondant fancies and tartes au citron. When French pastry chefs go to war, these are their weapons of choice. Macaroons are a miracle of science and culinary artistry: egg whites, sugar and almonds transformed by some mystic alchemy into a paragon of edibility.

City of delight

My obsession started on a work trip to Paris. I found myself standing in front of the French capital’s most celebrated patisserie, Ladurée, on Rue Royale. The window held me transfixed. It was filled with tiny coloured dots, each one a miniature macaroon sandwich (or gerbet, as I now know they are called). I came home clutching a box of them – maybe 20 flavours in all – which my girlfriend and I ate in a single gluttonous sitting. Lemon and raspberry and orange and coffee and chocolate and liquorice and pistachio and lime – it was like swallowing the chorus line of Joseph. Next trip, I sought out the shop of Pierre Hermé, the mad genius of patisserie, whose avant-garde macaroons have Parisian women queuing along the street. Salted caramel, lychee and rose, even white truffle – how could anyone resist a nibble of his minuscule sweetmeats?

Even so, I might have forgotten about them if they hadn’t followed me to London. No sooner had Ladurée set up shop in Harrods than macaroons began appearing at fashionable parties across the capital. The bakery chain Paul started selling them at stations. They turned up at the Tate Modern cafe and in Soho’s hip Chinese tearoom Yauatcha. The things were stalking me – and it felt like a challenge.

Over time, buying them, eating them, was no longer enough. I needed to commune with them, be as one with their secret – the perfect shiny dome enclosing a yielding centre, the pretty “feet” of froth in the centre, the inviting smoothness at their core. I wanted to play macaroon God.

Alas, that isn’t as easy as it sounds. You have no idea how many eggs I’ve separated, how many kilos of icing sugar and ground almonds I’ve sifted, how many hours I’ve spent on all fours in front of the oven with my arse in the air, peering through the glass door to see if the things are rising. There are three possible methods, and in all of them, the almonds need to be sieved to angel dust, the eggs beaten to perfection, the mixture piped into faultless circles. If your oven temperature or timing is out, you can quickly come to a sticky end. I read about one chef who made 30 batches a day for a month when he was training in France and did not achieve a single trayful that wasn’t flawed in some way.

I was a fool to believe that it might be different for me. But I began scouring cookbooks for something that would offer up their secret. I tried recipes from Le Gavroche and from Alain Ducasse, the most Michelin-starred chef in the world. I tried and I failed. One time, the shells didn’t rise; another, they cracked; another, they stuck. There was something these people weren’t telling me.

Nerd quest

I turned to the internet. There are hundreds of French websites devoted to the pursuit of homemade macaroon nirvana. The would-be macaroniers cluster round a guru called Mercotte, the Delia of whipped egg whites, who is regularly interviewed about her technique on television. But, while there were plenty of tips, there was still no definitive guide to perfection.

And so it was that I became a macaroon bore, telling anyone who would listen about my struggle with perfidious albumen and almonds. Colleagues started addressing me as Mr Macaroon. It had become a question of pride, a fierce battle between man and macaroon. I was going to make the buggers properly if it killed me. How dare they? How bloody dare they be so elusive? The jumped-up little biscuit bastards. I even sent e-mails to the head chef at Ladurée, begging for help.

I should point out that, like most men cooking at home, I’ve never been much of a precision freak. I usually swing the other way. Bit of this, bit of that, throw it together. But macaroons are different. Macaroons have brought out my inner train spotter. Something about this kind of baking appeals to a man’s Meccano tendencies. It’s not cooking – it’s a science project. There is a nerd in the machine in every man’s psyche. Mine found an outlet in petits fours.

Epiphany

And just when I was about to give up, along came the macaroon big bang. I spoke to Stuart Gillies, chef at the Boxwood Café in London and fellow macaroon-fancier. He provided psychological support. “There’s a sub-culture,” he said. “People are in the closet about it. But the more people speak up, the more will come forward.” He also set me on the path to success. His method was within a hair’s breadth of the one I’d finally arrived at on my own, but with two minor differences. He used a bit more egg white, and he cooked them at a slightly lower temperature. I made the adjustments – and it worked. Not just one macaroon, but (almost) a whole perfect trayful.

The journey’s not over yet. There are always new horizons, exotic new flavours to explore. But maybe I should give it a rest for a while. In the dark days before my macaroon epiphany, I called Style’s restaurant critic, AA Gill, to bemoan my failure. Surely there was some nugget of macaroon wisdom he had gleaned from his years of professional eating? A scrap of hope he could toss my way?

“You’re missing something,” he said. Yes? Yes? My heart was in my mouth. “It’s obvious,” he said. “You’re missing a life.”

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