These macarons are amazing. Truly! I have a real love-hate relationship with macarons and after doing some more research, have found a recipe that seems to work really well! Nadiya (ex Bake Off Champion) had a recipe for macarons in her cookbook "Nadiya's Kitchen", where she used a Swiss-meringue method to make the macaron shells. I decided to give this a go and finally used a stand mixer in the process. I ended up with lovely macarons. The only downside was that I ran out of baking parchment so used kitchen foil, which I'm pretty sure meant they cracked a little more than usual on top.
The filling is where these are unreal though. A kind of chocolate coffee custard, I was sceptical. However, after trying it with a little rock salt (as Nadiya suggests), these are incredible! Now the only area I was disappointed by was the colouring. I like to match the colour of my macarons to the filling, but I didn't have anything similar to brown food colouring and didn't want to add cocoa to her recipe (in case it messed up with the ratios). I'll do this next time, but for these, I turned them a variety of colours. However you colour them, these macarons are perfect as a mid-morning snack, on top of a cake, or just to eat in the evening.
These are delicious to eat straight after filling, but are even better the next day if you can wait that long.
My recipe is similar to Nadiya's, with a few amendments (e.g. not using brown food colouring). She also suggested using 70% cocoa solid dark chocolate. I only had the cheaper 55% in my cupboards and had no problem with setting/flavour :) Finally, Nadiya used espresso powder. I only had in normal instant coffee powder (Nescafe Gold Black Blend to be precise) and used that.
Makes around 30 macarons
Ingredients:
For the macaron shells:
- 175g (1 & 2/5 cups) ground almonds
- 175g (1 & 3/4 cups) icing sugar
- 4-5 egg whites (150g in total)
- Food colouring (brown if you have it)
- 200g (1 cup) caster sugar
- Gel food colouring of your choice
- 1 teaspoon of rock salt
For the filling:
- 2 egg yolks
- 100g (2/3 cup) dark chocolate (I used 55% cocoa solids)
- 150g (2/3 cup) butter
- 50g (1/4 cup and 1 tsp) soft light brown sugar
- 3 tbsp water
- 1 & 1/2 tsp instant coffee
- 1/2 tsp rock salt
Method:
1. Place the ground almonds and icing sugar in a food processor/high-power blender and pulse 3 times. Add 70g of the egg whites, and blitz again until the mixture is like a paste.
2. Place the remaining 80g of egg whites and caster sugar in a mixing bowl over a pan of simmering water. Use an electric whisk to beat the egg whites and sugar for 3-4 minutes. It will become white and very glossy.
3. Transfer the mixture to a stand mixer, and whisk on the highest setting for a further 4 minutes. At this point, the mixture will be very thick and when you lift the whisk from the mixture, a thick ribbon will form that stays visible for 10 seconds.
4. Fold a third of the egg white mixture into the ground almond paste. This loosens the mix. Fold the remaining egg whites into the paste until evenly distributed.
5. Take 4 sheets of greaseproof paper, and draw circles on one side of the paper. I made half of the macarons around 3cm and the rest miniature 1cm ones, so draw these circles, leaving at least 2cm between each circle. Flip the paper over and use these to line 4 baking trays.
6. Pipe vertically onto the centre of each circle until the circle has been filled. Once a tray has been filled, sprinkle each macaron with a little rock salt, tap the tray on the surface and set aside.
7. Leave for at least half an hour, until a "shell" is formed, meaning that when you touch the macaron, no mixture sticks to your hands.
8. Preheat the oven to 170c (150c fan)/340f/Gas mark 3.
9. Bake the 3cm macaron shells for 11-13 minutes, until they have obvious feet and look well risen. Bake the 1cm shells for around 6-7 minutes.
10. Leave to cool and prepare the filling. Chop the dark chocolate finely and place in a microwave on high power for 20-second bursts. Stir well after each burst until all of the chocolate has melted.
11. Place the coffee powder, salt water and brown sugar in a saucepan and heat gently until the sugar has dissolved. Place the egg yolks in a heatproof bowl, and then whisk over the coffee mixture.
12. Whilst whisking put the heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water and whisk for 4-5 minutes. The mixture will thicken slightly.
13. Take off the heat and whilst whisking, pour over the butter and melted chocolate. Keep whisking until fully incorporated. If you want to fill the macarons as soon as possible, once cool, place the filling in the fridge to firm up enough to be able to pipe (this will take around 45 minutes). Otherwise, leave it out at room temperature, as if left too long in the fridge, it will become too firm to be able to pipe.
14. To fill the macarons, flip half so that their bases are facing the air. Fill a piping bag with the filling and pipe some filling on each flipped half. Lightly press on top another macaron shell.
15. Leave overnight for the best macarons. Enjoy!
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