Monday, October 01, 2007

Macaron Trials - Strawberry, Black Sesame & Matcha with Roasted Chestnut

I went crazy after awhile, about macarons. The flavours, the texture, the precociousness of a mini labour of love...

These are the efforts of my trial run with flavours improvised on the spot: Strawberry, Black Sesame & Matcha.

Everyone loves the strawberry because nothing about it is artificially flavoured.

The problem with using sweet strawberry puree though, is that it makes the shells superbly watery and that in turn, gives me a flatter shell. The flavouring was my version of a strawberry buttercream, which surprisingly, didn't cream up as it should. But it was still the tastiest of them all. The wet butter cream though, would sometimes soak through the shell... affecting its visual impact.

The Black Sesame requires the addition of liquid in order to stop it from being so drying on the overall Macaron batter. The filling could do with a touch of liquid as well.
The more dry the ingredients, the stiffer my shell batter, meaning I have more control over the spread of my shells when baked. See the difference in the 'puffiness' of my shells across the different flavours? Matcha is equally 'drying'. The roasted chestnut came about because I couldn't be arsed to hunt around quality grocers for chestnuts - pureed or whole.


Also, I finally found the Marrons previously researched, at Jones The Grocer.
Can't wait to try it out on Matcha shells!

p.s. The copious sieving of almond flour through a fine mesh sieve is still a pain in the butt. I usually end up chucking the bits that are too large for my fine sieve with the rest of the dry ingredients, after 45 minutes of sieving. This is my sorry excuse for pimply shells.