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These macarons were made as a gift for my friends birthday. They’re a simple macaron recipe, most of the fun comes from the decoration.
The perfect macaron should have a hard shell, a chewy inside and a ruffled bottom edge.
Macaronage
Macaronage is the technique used to mix your ingredients together when making macarons. It’s a fickle beast, and it’s easy to get wrong.
You want to fold the mixture as gently as possible so as to not knock any air out of your meringue. Once it’s all mixed together, you need to smooth your mixtures around the sides of your bowl.
The aim is to make the mixture slightly runnier. Ideally, your mixture should fall off your spatula in ribbons, which take some time to reabsorb back into the mixture. If it falls off in clumps, you haven’t mixed it enough. If it falls off quickly and immediately reabsorbs back into the rest of the mixture, you’ve over mixed.
Decoration
To give these macarons their green colour, I used Colour Splash gel food colouring. You absolutely have to use gel or powder food colouring in macarons. Liquid food colouring will cause your macarons to deflate and spread.
I used the Sugarflair decorating pen in liquorice black for the eyes and mouth and the Sugarflair lustre dust in the shade shimmer pink for the cheeks. You can make them out of melted chocolate or icing if you’d prefer though!
Method
Cookies:
Sieve your icing sugar and almonds into a bowl.
In a separate bowl, add your egg whites and whisk in a clean dry bowl. Whisk until they get still peaks, then gradually add in your caster sugar. Once all your caster sugar is added, whisk for about another minute until the egg whites are fluffy again.
Add your egg whites into your bowl of almonds and add your vanilla extract.
Add in your food colouring (try and use as little as possible to get the right colour)
Fold your mixture gently until it’s all incorporated and then use your macaronage technique to smooth your mixture around the edges of the bowl. You can find a more detailed description of this here
Pipe your mixture onto macaron mats. You need 20 macaron shells that are just circles for the bottom and 20 that are frog face shaped
Tap them on the counter a few times to get any air bubbles out
Leave your macarons to sit to one side for about an hour so the top forms a skin
Heat your oven to 130c fan/150c non fan
Bake your macarons for around 18 minutes until they’ve puffed up with ruffled feet
Remove them from the oven and leave them to cool on the mats
Decoration:
Make your buttercream filling by mixing your butter and icing sugar together
Add a teaspoon of vanilla extract. If you want to, you can add a couple of drops of green food colouring to match your macaron shells
Once your cookies have completely cooled, pipe buttercream onto the bottom halves of your cookies
On the top half cookies, draw your frog face. Don’t forget to use your lustre dust for their blushy cheeks!
Sandwich your cookies halves together
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