Pandan Gula Melaka Macaron

I was thinking of the possibility flavour I could make for the macarons with a twist of my homeland flavour - Malaysia. So here I am, I decided to make Pandan Gula Melaka Macaron.

To give you some ideas of the ingredients, I'll write a little about these 2 dominant ingredients in Malaysian desserts.

I remember many desserts in Malaysia are always made of Gula Melaka, it's a type of palm sugar. It's darker than other usual palm sugar, and its distinctive taste is irreplaceable by other type of palm sugar tastes. It taste very much like caramel.

Pandan leaf is another ingredient in Malaysian dessert. The leaf is use to fragrance most dessert by infusing the leave in the sugar syrup or using them in a paste form. We also use Pandan leaf to fragrance the rice.

Gula Melaka Macaron (in white) along Lavender Macarons

FOR THE MACARON SHELL
1 room temperatured egg white(39-40g)
50g icing sugar
30g ground almond
30g castor sugar
some brown sugar (to sprinkle on top, optional)

Method:
1. Put ground almond and icing sugar along with the colouring in a food processor or a small blender. Blend them finely.

2. Sift the blended mixture and set aside

3. With an electric beater, Beat the egg white, start from low speed and increase slowly to maximum speed. Beat until frothy (you will see lots of fine bubbles)

4. Now it's the time to add in the castor sugar, add half of the sugar, continue to beat in maximum speed for around 2 minutes, add in the other half, continue until you get very stiff peak.

5. Mix the dry ingredients into the egg whites. This process is called Macaronage. Start folding with a rubber spatula. When you get smooth shiny mixture, stop folding, lift the mixture with spatula, if the mixture falls back slowly in the bowl means you're good to go. You could also check if the lines formed from the lifted mixture, they should slowly disappear in within 30 seconds. At this stage you're good to go. Do not over fold, it will be too liquid and becoming very hard to pipe.
if you're unsure, you could refer to my basic macaron recipe as a guide HERE

6. Line the baking tray with the parchment paper.

7. Fill your piping bag , pipe your macaron (about 2 cm diameter) it should spread a bit as it settles. The point should slowly disappear if the mixture is the right consistency.
If not you could hit the bottom of the tray with your hand to smooth the point out)

8. Sprinkle half of the Macaron shell with some brown sugar.

9. Let your macarons sit for about 30minutes. This will depend on the humidity in your house and the day. Try touching the macaron softly, after 30mins. it should not stick to your hand.

10. Heat your oven to 150 C on the (heating on the top only). When the oven is ready, put your macaron at the very bottom shelf. Bake for 12 minutes, check them in the mid time of 6 minutes, the feets should already start forming. Turn the baking tray to the opposite direction to allow even baking. When the 6 mins is up, change the heating setting of your oven to Bottom only. This will help cooking the macaron and rise the feet more. Bake for another 6 minutes. You can test if the macaron is cook, touch softly on the shell and when the macaron doesn't slide on the feet, it's cooked. if it's not add another 1 mins each time and check.

(This is the method i found the best that works for me after few trial and error. I baked with heating the oven top and bottom and i had crack macarons. Having said that, every oven is slightly different than another, so please adjust accordingly)

11. Let the macaron cool down before removing them. You could wet your working area and slide the baking sheet on it to speed up the cooling process, but do not let it sit there too long, if not the macarons will become soggy. Other wise you can leave them cool at room temperature and remove them.

FOR THE PANDAN GULA MELAKA BUTTERCREAM FILLING (Enough to fill up 40 Macarons)

As the recipe called for 1 egg, it's hard to divide them. So I normally freeze up the left over and unfroze them when I need to use them for the next time, alternately, you could triple up the quantity given above for the macaron shells to get around 36-40 Macarons)

Ingredients

1 large egg
250g butter (soften at room temperature)
125g gula melaka (chopped finely or ground it)
1 pandan leaf, cut into 4-5cm pieces

Methods

1. Warm up a pot of water on the stove. (large enough to sit your metal mixing bowl inside)

2. In the mixing bowl, add the egg, gula melaka and the pandan leave. Put it over the pot of water, using a hand beater, beat the egg and sugar. Beat until you obtain a fluffy mousse texture.

3. When the mixture becomes lukewarm, remove from the pot. Continue beating to cool down the mixture.

4. Add in the soften butter little by little into the mixture. Stop mixing when you get a smooth creamy texture. It should takes about 10 minutes to get the texture.

5. Pipe the buttercream on one of the macaron shell, then close up with the other shell in similar size.

6. After finish piping all the macarons, pop them in an air tight container. Leave them in refrigerator overnight. You could keep the macarons up to 48 hours in the frige. if not consumed, freeze them up. Because after 48 hours they will lose the texture.




TIP:

The macarons are best eaten the day after they're make. They take up some humidity and the shell is crispy outside and soft inside.