Oh gosh, it has been so long since I last participated in the MACTWEET challange! I am back. Still going crazy with all the last bits and pieces for the wedding...however I managed to find sometime last week to finally bake some macarons :0)
Spiced & Sweet with anything Fruity is the theme for this month challange, with fresh strawberries everywhere in the season now, I thought it would be great as the filling.
On the spicy side, i am not keen on any other spices that would be too overwhelming. I decided to choose green anis.
Here we go the recipe
For the shell
Ingredients
1. 40g egg white
2. 30g almond powder
3. 50g icing sugar
4. 30g castor sugar
5. 1/2 tsp of red colouring
Methods:
1. In a blender, mix up the almond powder with icing sugar, sieve it and set aside
2. Using an electric beater, beat up the egg white till frothy, add in half of the castor sugar, keep beating till you get a soft peak and then add in the rest of the sugar. Beat to stiff peak.
3. Add the blended dry ingredients to the stiff egg white.
4. Gently give it a few fold, scoop up on tablespoon of the mixture into an extra clean bowl.
5. At this stage, add in the red colouring, keep folding until you get a mixture that flow slowly like lava. This should take about 50 fold. The mixture should be uniformed, shiny and when lifted it should flow down and form a thick ribbon.
6. Stop folding or else it would get too liquid to pipe.
7. Put a piece of baking sheet over a baking tray, pipe the mixture.
8. When you're done, to make some pretty swirl on the shells, use a toothpick, dip into the plain white mixture that was set aside earlier, and then dip it into the piped shell then make a stir. The point or any lines would disapper in the next few seconds eventually.
9. Let the macaron sit until a shell is formed and it's nolonger sticked to the fingers when touched. Depanding on your room temperature, and air humidity this should takes somewhere between 30 minutes to 1 hour.
10. Pre heat the oven on 160 C with only top heating.
11. When the oven is heated up, put in the piped macarons, bake for 8 mins, the feet should already start forming at this stage.
12. Change the heating to bottom only, bake for another 6 minutes. To know if your macarons are baked, you could try it by gently touching the shells, when it's baked it should nolonger slide against the feet.
13. If the macaron is not baked yet, extense the baking time by 1 minutes and recheck.
14. Let macaron cooled before removing them from the baking sheet.
15. Match up all the similar size shells, and get the ready for filling.
For the Strawberry Spiced Ganache
Ingredients
1. 20g dark chocolate (chopped up)
2. 40g white chocolate (chopped up)
3. 1 teaspoon of green anis powder
4. 3-4 strawberries halved
5. 1 teaspoon corn starch
Method
1. In a small pot, over low heat, add in strawwberries & corn starch, cook them thouroughly until it forms like a puree and thicken up
2. When the mixture is warm enough, remove from heat. Add in dark and white chocolate and stir constantly until a smooth texture is obtained
3. Let sit in room temperature for 30min - 1 hour to cool down.
4. Fill your macaron shells and sprinkle with green anis powder before closing it with another shell
Enjoy :0)
