Pink macarons with raspberry filling

O, it was sooooo long since I last made macarons!! I actually had to look it up how long ago it has been and it was – I kid you not – december of last year!! Unbelievable! I made lavender macarons at the time and they were fantastic so why o why did I not make any others..? I have no reasons whatsoever, other then maybe fear of another failure… 🙂 But when we did our patisserie course (which is now finished) at Douglas Delights, I think we decided in the first lesson that we definitely also wanted to do macarons in the lesson about cookies… And so we did… Carle used a totally different method from the one I had used previously, but I love the end result, so I will definitely be trying this again at home. I will tell you all about it

But first let me tell you that I will also dedicate this post to Pink Ribbon for the Mac Attack of this month. You all know the Mactweets website, don’t you?

The wonderful Mac-dominated site set up by the lovely Jamie, from Life’s a Feast and Deeba from Passionate about Baking. I have been following the blogs of both these lovely ladies for quite awhile now and besides being passionate cooks and bakers, they are also wonderful women. You’ll see if you visit their beautiful blogs!

Now by pure coincidence the Mactweets challenge for this month was for Pink macarons in support of Pink Ribbon, since October is the Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I think a lot of us have probably been touched by cancer at some point in our lives, as I believe at the moment the amount of people getting any form of cancer is one in three. That is a truly dreadful number. In the past year we have lost several people close to either us or to our friends to cancer and I truly think it is one of the most horrible diseases out there. Breast cancer – if detected in time – is one of the cancers that has a 98% survival rate, which is high for cancer, but detecting it early is therefore of the utmost importance!

So in support of the Breast Cancer Awareness Month, this month is all about Pink macarons or as Jamie and Deeba call it ‘PINKARONS FOR PINKTOBER”!

Am I cheating a little bit if I did not truly make these macarons alone? But they are pink, right? 🙂 So I thought I combine the two and cheat just a tiny little bit..

So what was so different from this method? The very first time I made macarons I used the so called ‘Italian method’, also referred to as the warm method and failed completely. I think I managed to have a few macaron-shells that were not broken, but the majority ended up being one big lump of broken pieces… Still tasty but hardly what you can call a succes. I have since used the famous “French” method or the one where you use cold eggwhites as opposed to warm. If my memory serves me well, the method that Carle was slightly different again, but it worked wonderful and seems to be less fragile then the French method.

Let me start by giving you the recipe that we used:

Print recipe Pin Recipe Save as favorite Saved!

No ratings yet

Pink macarons with raspberry filling

Ingredients

• 125 gr ground almonds
• 125 gr icing sugar
• 48 gr eggwhites
• ___________________
• 125 gr + 15 gr sugar
• 48 gr eggwhites
• Raspberry filling
• 90 gr raspberry jam
• 44 gr frozen raspberries
• 1/4 tsp pectine
• 1 tsp eau de vie de framboise raspberry liquor

Instructions

• To start mix the icing sugar together with the almonds. Make sure there are no lumps so put them through a sieve. Mix the two together well and add the first 48 gr of eggwhites; not beaten!! Heat the oven to 150C.
• Put a little bit of water in a small saucepan. It should just cover the bottom and add 148 gr of sugar here. The extra 15 gr of sugar is merely to make up for whatever is left sticking to the sides of the pan once cooked.
• Beat the other 48 gr of eggwhites stiff and add the coloring of your choice at this stage into the eggwhites. Boil the sugar to 120 C. While the eggwhites are being beaten add the hot sugar and keep on mixing until the mixture is lukewarm. Really make sure it is not too hot. While pouring in the sugar on top of the eggwhites, do not pour directly on top of the whiskers or that will make a mess.
• Once it is cool enough add the mixture to the almond mixture and fold it in together until the mixture resembles thick ribbons and will flow back if you make a peak. Put it on a baking tray. Depending on your oven; it should bake 12-15 minutes.
•  FILLING
• Put everything together in a small saucepan (except the alcohol) and heat. Make sure you leave it to boil well with the pectine. Take it of the fire and add the eau de vie. Use about 5 gr of filling per macaron. Don't wait too long or the filling will become gelatinous and will be difficult to spread evenly as we found out. Hence the dots on the macaron shells. We were a bit messy!!
• Sidenote: we made the filling but ended up short, so we had to make more, so either we messed up with applying or we had too many macarons... 🙂

Disclaimer

The nutritional values above are calculated per portion. The details are based on standard nutritional tables and do not constitute a professional nutritional advice.

Did you make this recipe?Mention @simoneskitchen or tag #simoneskitchen!

Piping the macarons on the baking sheet

And not one, NOT ONE, macaron was broken, cracked or otherwise not perfect. Well, that is not true; some had a very big size and others were tiny, but that was our not so expert piping… Otherwise the macs where just beautiful. I think we left out putting the ground almond through a sieve which account for a not entirely smooth surface, so make sure you do that if you want to have a smooth skin. But did you see their beautiful little feet??

I’ve got all inspired to make more macs, so expect to see more of these beauties very soon! O, just for the record; we used eggwhite from a carton and not fresh eggs. If you live in Holland, apparently the brand to get is van Tol eggwhites as Danegg for some reason seems to be less effective when it comes to making macarons.

And then to finalize it, here is the Mactweets logo!

Sharing is caring!