Daring Bakers - Macarons

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

My macarons are peach flavoured and filled with raspberry ganache. The nacarons behaved quite well, and had domes and feet, so I was pleased with them, even if they were not as aesthetically perfect as the macarons I made in July with a different recipe.

I had the benefit of reading the DB forums for the first half of the month before making these, and to flavour my macarons, I used peach tea, as suggested by Audax. The tea gave the macarons a pronounced peach flavour, and made flecks through the surface of the macaron for appearance and texture. However, even after 4 drops of liquid orange colouring, my macarons are not very peach-coloured - oh well.

Notice the feet!

It was the ganache, not the macarons themselves, which let me down. I tried a recipe for the ganache that says to add a third of a cup of raspberry jam to the cream and white chocolate for flavour. That is where disaster set in, and I ended up with a sticky, runny mess that never set up. However, chocolate is an expensive commodity, and I wasn't prepared to pour it into the bin and start again when really the point of the exercise for me was the macaron base, not the filling.

Despite the runny, hopeless filling, these macarons tasted delicious, and it hasn't put me off making macarons again should I have a yen to do so. However, it was nonetheless disappointing that the filling spoiled the appearance of the macarons.

Here's a shot of inside the macaron - it had a lovely chewy texture inside:

You can see a rainbow display of macarons of all varieties by going to The Daring Bakers blogroll. And for some cute as a button but no cal macarons, see Sian Keagan's wool macarons at Lushlee.