My parents house is one of my favourite places in the world. They live on the top of a hill with three hundred and sixty degree views of mountains, on the border of a national park. It is so secluded and peaceful. They keep goats and battle with the wallabies and possums for control over their gardens and fruit trees.

Mum, my brother’s lovely girlfriend and I made these macarons there a couple of days after Christmas, even though there was still so much food left. This was not what I’d call a masterclass (particularly because I am clearly no where near a master and these were not the most perfect batch I’ve ever made), but we did want to figure out what might have gone wrong in my brother’s latest ‘volcano’ batch. 

We realised several things:

1. Italian meringue really does need to be whipped for a full ten minutes after the sugar syrup is added, so that it is cool enough to work properly

2. Digital thermometers have an annoying habit of turning themselves off after making a reading, which makes it hard to watch it getting close to the all-important 115 degrees celsius.

3. Talking too much while mixing the macaron batter can result in macarons that run together. This might also be caused by too coarse almond meal, so process and sift it well.

4. Always bake macarons one tray at a time, in the centre of the oven. They are very sensitive to hot spots, and there always seem to be adjustments to be done to time or temperature. The first tray should be considered a bit of a test run.

Did I mention the batter was runny? Well, that resulted in this, the invention of the macaron bar. I am actually quite inspired by this for future macaron shape creations. I’m thinking macaron men, letters and numbers for cake decoration, flower shaped macarons. Basically anything rounded that can be piped. 

In case you were wondering, this was the batter. It doesn’t look too runny, but you have to stop know when to stop stirring and wait for it to smooth out. You can always give it a few more turns, but never less.

They didn’t turn out so bad, though…

We decided to make a coffee buttercream for the filling, which was one of the most delicious and easy fillings I’ve done. 

Just like my raspberry buttercream, it’s 240g softened butter + 240g caster sugar, creamed. Add 8 tablespoons of freshly brewed coffee and beat until you get a uniformly creamy, smooth mixture and the sugar has dissolved.

Sublime. It is surprising how different coffee tastes in a dessert. My Dad is not a coffee drinker, yet even he enjoyed these. Macarons are a great enticer to new flavours…although my husband still won’t drink tea.

Photos courtesy of Zoe’s phone and instagram.

P.S I got Adriano Zumbo’s recipe book for Christmas, so expect some Zumbo inspired posts in future!

One of my beautiful friends is getting married soon, and I have been enlisted to make some of the macarons for her favours. She bought favour boxes online, but as it happened they were not the size she had envisaged - too long and narrow for normal sized macarons. No problem, I told her. We can pipe out macarons any size. So, this weekend I set out to make some macarons for Christmas, and try out the timing and temperature for these little babies. 

So, we printed out a piping template of 3cm circles, and set out to make two flavours; caramel and fresh raspberry buttercream.

The caramel batch went all to plan, business as usual…

My new silicon baking mats were quite good for macarons - their ability to stay in place while piping was very much appreciated.

For the filling, I went serious with my salted caramel. Unlike my previous buttercream, this was going to be sticky, thick and that killer balance of sweet and salty. 

250g caster sugar

75ml water

120ml cream

200g salted butter

salt flakes to taste (I used approximately 2 tablespoons)

Caramelise the sugar with the water in a saucepan over medium heat. It should be a light caramel colour, not too dark. 

Stir the cream in gradually, preventing the sugar from cooking further. Try not to panic as it gets all excited and frothy. 

Take its temperature, and take it off the heat when it gets to 108C

Add the butter in small pieces and stir until smooth.

Refrigerate for an hour or so, so that it thickens enough to fill the macarons.

These are fabulously delicious. Crunch, smooth, sweet, salt…mmm nom. 

Now, the raspberry ones were quite another story. These little beasts started off well. We bought a kilo of homegrown fresh raspberries out of the back of a car. Sigh, I love summer. 

However, my shells were a bit doomed from the beginning. Firstly, I tried to make purple out of blue and red colouring. It became quite weird and grey, was rescued by the addition of a fair bit more red, and was then darkened again by the baking. The second tray worked better, as I reduced the temperature and increased the time by a bit. 12 or 13 minutes on 140C for these, and 11 to 12 minutes on 150 for the caramel.

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. I had some strange delusion that I could make two batches of meringue in a row, using the same unwashed bowl. Ha! No. Always use clean, try utensils if you expect your egg whites to form peaks.

Next, I ended up whipping the egg whites too much - until they started to break off and dry out. That freaked me out enough to slightly overheat the sugar. The meringue worked out alright this time, but there were sugar crystals in the mix that made the piping extremely difficult (they got stuck in the nozzle continually). 

As much as it damaged my peace of mind, they still worked out fine. 

For my filling, I used my Mum’s buttercream recipe.

Very simple:

240g butter

240g caster sugar

6 Tbsp warmed fresh raspberries

Cream butter and sugar, then gradually add the raspberry until incorporated. 

This is very easy to work with compared with some of the buttercream recipes I’ve used for macarons, ready to fill immediately!

It is also smooth and fresh, deliciously raspberry. The flavour isn’t quite intensely fruity enough for me (compared to a fistful of the pure, unadulterated berries themselves), but I’ll work on that.

Merry Christmas!

It is becoming a compulsive desire, this making of macarons. The flavours float around in my head, capturing me in a giddy trance. There are so many, they are all so very delicious. 

This time: Chocolate. Cinnamon. Chilli. The flavours come to you in layers, the sweet shells of the macarons, the bitterness, warmth, then sizzle. Good. 

Make up a ganache with approximately 300g dark chocolate and 300ml cream, then add cinnamon and chilli to taste. I added rather a lot, because my chilli powder was rather tame. 

These are the leftovers, as the others were all consumed in father’s day celebrations. You may note the rogue, mismatched pink shell. This is a characteristic of the last-to-fill. 

There were also raspberry. Simple, obvious. Although the shells tend to soften a little more when you use fresh fruit, they taste fresh and beautiful. To make them, just use a basic buttercream recipe (as in my last post) and add about 80g of raspberries at the end. I used frozen raspberries, only partially defrosted, which may have contributed to the moisture.

Now, for anyone who has made macarons, you know it can be a time-consuming process, and making more than one flavour/colour takes twice as long (naturally). I wanted to do an experiment in efficiency this time; Make two different flavours of macarons, while essentially just doubling the mixture.

Since they are so sensitive, and the recipe demands such precise measurements, I didn’t want to just double the recipe and then split it haphazardly. That way you could end up with a failed batch and a good one, or just two manky batches. 

So, I measured out two lots of almond meal and icing sugar and two lots of egg whites, for the almond paste. I added cocoa to one of them.

I then made a double batch of meringue, weighed it, and took out half.

At this point I had a dilemma. I could mix both batches now, and risk one mixture sitting while I mixed and piped the other one, or I could mix one and leave half of the meringue to sit in the bowl. Ideally I could have someone help me to pipe, but I was flying solo today.

I decided to mix both of them. 

The batch mixed first did cook better. It yielded more shells overall, and came off the paper much easier. The second batch tended to stick to the paper, even after I returned it to the oven to cook a bit longer. 

The problem with macarons is that they can be so enigmatic. It is so often a mystery why something worked, or why it didn’t. I don’t have enough scientific proof (yet) to know precisely why this turned out as it did. 

Nonetheless, they still worked and tasted wonderful, and they took a bit less time to make.

I love tea. I love it for its warmth, for its light and cleansing, calming effect. I always drink it without milk and unsweetened. I love good green tea.

Luckily for me, there is a gourmet tea emporium nearby. They have loyalty cards, and I just got my eleventh box free. What fun!

This is one thing on which my husband and I disagree. He does not like tea, not in the slightest. I wonder, if maybe I could change his mind…by adding tea to one of our favourite things. Macarons.

Tea is not an unheard of ingredient in macarons, and I have the perfect variety to make them sing. Japanese Morning Dew - green tea with lime blossoms, rose petals and a fruity aroma.

I am concerned, however, that the flavour will be too subtle, and the complex flavours of my tea will be lost…let’s see, shall we.

José Marechal’s Macarons

200g almond meal

200g pure icing sugar

2 x 80g egg whites

200g white sugar

75g water (I’m going to try exchanging this for well-infused tea. I haven’t seen this anywhere before, and I’m not sure if it will make a difference to the flavour or not)

Process the almond meal and icing sugar together in a food processor, then sift into a large bowl. 

Place the sugar and water into a small saucepan with a candy thermometer at the ready, and bring to a simmer.

Begin beating 80g of the egg whites on medium speed in a mixer to soft peaks.

When the sugar syrup reaches 105C, turn the mixer up to high. At 115C, take off the heat and pour in a thin stream into the egg whites, continuing to beat for 10 minutes, until cooled.

Add the other 80g of egg whites to the almond and sugar mix (tant pour tant), and combine to form a smooth paste. Add any colouring to this mixture, with compensation for the addition of all that white meringue. I added just enough to make a very pale green.

Mix in a quarter of the meringue to the tant pour tant to loosen it, then add the rest. To complete the macaronage, use a flexible spatula to fold under and over and into the centre - until the mixture relaxes and the surface is rather smooth when left for 10-20 seconds. 

Pipe with a round 8-10mm nozzle onto baking paper, on a flat baking sheet (if your sheets have edges, like mine do, you can use them upside down so that the paper stays flat).

Rest, to form a skin, for 30 minutes or until the mixture does not stick to your finger when touched lightly.

Bake at 150C for 14 minutes. If your colouring is light, you may need to turn the oven down a little and increase the time by a few minutes, to avoid any browning.

Leave for a minute once out of the oven, before lifting gently off the paper. It pays to use an icing spatula or similar to slide under the shells. 

For the filling, I’m going to adapt a white chocolate ganache by infusing tea into the cream. The ideal temperature for green tea is 85-90C, so if you want to ensure the best flavour, bring the cream to the boil and then bring it to this temperature before adding the cream and infusing for at least 10 minutes.

150g white chocolate

120ml cream

1 Tbsp tea leaves

Once the tea is infused, reheat the cream and add to the chocolate, stirring together until melted and smooth.

Oh, she of little faith. The flavour is subtle, but it’s there, and it intensifies over time. That floral resonance.

But what to call them? Fruity Green Tea, Rose and Lime Blossom Macarons is a tad too descriptive. Morning Dew Macarons, perhaps. Whatever I call these ones, I know that any other tea will yield a completely different taste sensation. Don’t be afraid to try.

And the boy’s opinion? He eagerly gave it a try (this is a macaron, not a cup of weird hot liquid, why wouldn’t he!)…The look on his face said it all. His eyes popped and the eyebrows went up. He chewed, then he positively gushed with wonderment. Apparently if I am going to get him to taste tea, this is the acceptable form.

Wait, what is that in the background? Well, because one batch of macarons is never enough, and I needed these to share with people over two nights, on two separate games nights (yes, I’m quite the socialite), I decided to make another. 

These ones are Peanut Butter and Cocoa Macarons.

To add the cocoa to the shells, the quantities are changed a bit. It will now be:

180g almond meal

200g icing sugar

30g cocoa

Apart from that little addition to the tant pour tant, nothing changes. You also don’t have to worry about colouring, unless you want a deeper brown than this. I sprinkled some finely chopped peanuts onto the top of mine, as I’ve seen elsewhere. Be warned, a lot of mine cracked because of this. I will have to investigate how to stop that happening.

(This is the start of macaronage, by the way)

If you really want to, you could probably just fill these with peanut butter. 

I made a peanut butter buttercream. 

3 egg yolks

90g caster sugar

2 Tbsp water

125g butter, softened and chopped

100g smooth peanut butter

60g roasted peanuts, chopped

Whisk the egg yolks in a mixer for ten minutes on high speed. They should be pale and creamy by the end of this.

Simmer the sugar and water in a small saucepan until it reaches 121C. Take off the heat and pour in a thin stream into the mixer, on medium speed.

I want a KitchenAid. My ancient Kenwood is the noisiest thing on my street, and having it on for 20 minutes can send you batty. 

Add cubes of the butter, one at a time. 

Add peanuts and peanut butter and you should have a lovely, crunchy, light buttercream.

This flavour is so very comforting. There is something about chocolate and peanut butter. It is so huge in the USA, and there are so many recipes online, but I am only just beginning to discover the sheer breadth of possibilities for this combination. 

Enjoy.

I have previously failed miserably at making macarons. I just couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get them to ‘pop’. Fortunately for me, my awesome husband was game for a team building exercise, and I had finally managed to get my hands on a candy thermometer and the elusive 10mm round piping nozzle (my cake decorating set had various odd shapes and fluted ends, but never a plain round one bigger than a pinprick). My advice is, if you want to make them, make sure you have the right equipment.

There are millions of macaron blogs out there, and so many instructions to impart, so I really only want to document the accomplishment of this thing that had so eluded me.

My earlier attempts were over-aired and unstable, liable to disintegrate on touch. They developed the obligatory ‘feet’ of real macarons only because I left them out to croutage dry and form a skin overnight. Also, although at the time I put it down to using a fluted piping nozzle, their lack of smooth tops are the result of too tentative macaronage mixing. They will not be shamed, but are magnanimous in defeat.

The magnanimous: some earlier attempts. 

Those ones were filled with quite a delectable lemon buttercream and a lovely raspberry ganache, so even though the shells failed, we couldn’t complain.

THESE are the real deal. Pecan Caramel Macarons. They were filled with a very delicate buttercream for which we got the recipe out of Macaron by Alison Thompson

They turned out practically perfect in every way, considering they looked just like the pictures in José Marechal’s cookbook Secrets of Macarons, where we got the shell recipe. However, we did get a bit nervous about the cooking time, and give them more than the 14 minutes designated, which made them a bit more crunchy and chewy than the next batch. 

This is the gorgeous pink tant pour tant almond meal-icing sugar mixture for our next batch.

Chocolate-Pistachio-Cranberry Macarons

This filling was my own creation, a 70% cocoa ganache with chopped pistachios and cranberries, as well as a couple of whole ones added in as we filled them.

We baked these for about 15 minutes, to make up for the opening and closing of the oven. We also had to lower the temperature a bit to keep them from browning.

So vindicated.

Oli thinks it was mostly his contribution that made the difference, of course.

Acknowledgments: