3 Ingredient Coconut Macaroons

These 3 ingredient coconut macaroons are so delicious, yet quick and simple to make.  Sometimes these are called coconut cookies, but this is a chocolate macaroon recipe that anybody can make at home even if you have never done it before. 

Let’s dive right in and learn how to make coconut and chocolate macaroons …

Ingredients

The ingredients for this recipe are very easy and simple, it is called 3 ingredient coconut macaroons afterall!

Coconut

We need about 3 cups of coconut.  Here I am using a simple 50 – 50 mixture of desiccated coconut and shredded coconut.  However you can use only one of these if that is all you have available, that is perfectly fine.  

I prefer the mixture because the desiccated coconut pieces are much finer, but the shredded coconut gives them a nice chewy texture.  Since the shredded coconut pieces are bigger, they tend to stick out of the resulting ball of mixture and can burn quickly if you are not watching them. 

So I tend to go for a combination of the two coconuts.  Use whatever coconut you have available to you, but if you can get both I highly recommend making a 50 – 50 mixture of the two coconuts.  Don’t overthink it though, we are making tasty treats here, not a rocket ship!

Sweetened Condensed Milk

We need ¾ of a cup of that milky, sugary goodness in a can called sweetened condensed milk.  Buy it from the shops, the brand you use does not really matter, I found Nestle the day I was shopping to take these pictures but use whatever you have available.  

If the kids are helping you make this, make sure they keep their paws off the sweet condensed milk, mine love to dip their fingers in it when I am not looking!

Chocolate

About ½ a cup of melted chocolate will do this batch.  Melt more if you want to coat the macaroons in more chocolate than in my pictures.  

I am using baking chocolate chips here, but of course almost any plain chocolate will do.  Plain as in no fruit or nuts as they make it harder to stick the chocolate to the macaroon.

Dark chocolate tastes great if you are dark chocolate lovers.

When I am shopping I compare the prices of the baking chocolate chips to small plain milk chocolate bars.  Sometimes the bars work out much cheaper and I buy and melt them instead.  

And that is it – just 3 items make up these tasty 3 ingredient coconut macaroons. 

Of course you can leave out the chocolate and turn these into 2 ingredient coconut macaroons.  People love chocolate in my house, but if for any reason you don’t want to use chocolate, that is perfectly fine, they still taste great.

Gluten free macaroons

All of our 3 ingredients here are naturally gluten free – but watch out for additives.  According to Healthline.com pure chocolate is naturally gluten free, and with high quality ingredients you should be fine.

I have inspected the packaging of the coconut, condensed milk and chocolate that I used here to make sure there are no additives containing gluten, and all the products I used are gluten free.  Be sure to check your own brands and packages.

Directions

In a large mixing bowl, combine the desiccated and shredded coconut.  Mix thoroughly with a fork or spoon until they are well combined.

The two different coconuts will blend nicely together.  

Next add about half of the condensed milk to the dry coconut mixture.  Mix well with a fork. Keep adding the condensed milk until the mixture looks like the picture below.  

The mixture should not be too wet, so if necessary hold back some of the condensed milk.  If the mixture is too wet, the macaroons will not hold together in the oven. See the bloopers section below! 

When your mixture looks like the picture below, you are good to go.  You might think it is too dry, but trust me it is just right. Once you have made this recipe a couple of times you will get a feel for the moisture content of the mix.

Once the mixture is ready, I like to press it down in the bowl with a mixing spoon or tablespoon.  This compresses the mix and makes it easier to form nice balls to place on the baking tray.  

If you have a melon baller that works great to make the balls of mix.  However I didn’t have one available when I took these pictures, I just used a tablespoon and my clean hands to form the mix into nice sized balls to place onto the baking tray.

In the picture below, you can place the balls of mixture closer together, I was making a small batch so spaced them farther apart.  

If you are following the ingredient quantities, you will run out of space on the baking tray at this spacing, so space them closer together.

Pop the baking tray in a pre-heated 350 degree Fahrenheit (180 Celsius) oven.  Bake them for 10 to 15 minutes, but take them out of the oven once they turn a nice golden brown. 

The baking time depends entirely on your oven.  Your oven is going to be different to mine. If you have a fan forced oven, or one that tends to run hot, you will need to reduce the time, sometimes significantly.    

Because of all the sugar in these macaroons, they will burn very quickly, so you must watch them and take them out of the oven according to their color, not according to the time. 

Once they look like the picture below, it is time to take them out of the oven regardless of the time. 

Now we want to melt our chocolate so we can dip the golden brown macaroons into it!

The day I took these pictures, I was staying in an AirBnB and the kitchen was not that well stocked, so I had to improvise a double boiler with what I had available, which was an old wok and a regular bowl.

So you can whip up a double boiler to melt your chocolate with pretty much anything you have available! Check out this Youtube video showing how to make your own double boiler.

Once you have melted the chocolate, dip each baked macaroon into the delicious melted goodness.  The depth of your melted chocolate will determine how far up the side of the macaroon the chocolate goes, and therefore how much chocolate is in each one. 

My melted chocolate was about half an inch (1 centimetre) deep, and I rotated them in the melted chocolate to get nice swirls around the base of the macaroon.

I take them off the tray I baked the macaroons in, dip them in chocolate, and pop them straight back onto the same baking tray.  

Once they are all dipped in chocolate, pop the whole tray in the fridge for about an hour. 

I find that refrigerating them for an hour or more helps the coconut mix and chocolate to firm up, and I swear they taste better after some time in the fridge.  However, if you can’t spare the hour, I’m sure your hungry crew will enjoy them as soon as the chocolate cools. 

Bloopers

Well, nobody is perfect, and I made some mistakes while making this recipe to take pictures the other day.  In my own defense, I was in a new kitchen and not familiar with the oven, but hey, we learn from our mistakes.  

I named the batch in the picture below the “delicious disaster”.  While they still tasted great, and my kids happily gobbled up the gooey mess, a couple of things caused this.

I had too much condensed milk in the mixture.  You can see that they did not hold their shape and ran all over the baking tray and into each other. I was winging the ingredient proportions for a small batch and had far too much condensed milk.  

Unknown to me, the oven was a fan forced oven that ran hot! And I was not watching them close enough, so they got burnt on their edges.  Make sure you keep a close eye on them, especially the first time you make them in your oven.

You might also like to try my quick and easy date scones they also only have a few ingredients but are super delicious!

I hope you enjoy making these 3 ingredient coconut macaroons as much as I did, it was a great way to spend the afternoon inside.