Experiments with Macarons

I have a serious case of ‘if someone else can so can I’, and it’s no different with macarons. After several experiments with recipes for the basic mix, I have decided that Ed Kimber’s is the most reliable and least like to sink/burn/fail and leave you bereft and empty.

The base recipe can be found here, just alter the food colouring accordingly.

http://www.frenchweddingstyle.com/wedding-macarons-with-edd-kimber/

Using this recipe, I have played around with fillings and flavours- here are three of my favourites.

Rose and Raspberry

So this is a variation on the above recipe, I think it needed a sharper element.

I coloured the shells using pink gel food colouring, which is bake stable and doesn’t make the recipe too runny to work. The filling is a buttercream, coloured with a darker pink (Waitrose natural pink) and flavoured with rose water to taste. Then ice both shells to protect them from the raspberry juice, and crumble a raspberry across the one of the shells.

White Chocolate and Sea Salt

This macaron was coloured with yellow gel colouring. The filling is white chocolate ganache- melted chocolate with a splash of cream mixed in. I added Maldon Sea Salt to taste- its a sweet hit followed by a gorgeous salt aftertaste. My favourite!

Dark Chocolate with Mint

I left the shells natural for this macaron, which gives a beautiful pure white colour. The filling is ganache made with dark chocolate and cream, as before, but with a generous splash of peppermint oil stirred in.

Have fun playing with colours and flavours….and design. Here’s what you can do with a paint chart….

Stay Unchained<3

Happy Birthday!

This year we spent my Dad’s birthday at The Curry Corner- the world famous Bangladeshi restaurant in Cheltenham which utterly blew me away. Dad raves about the place constantly, to the point where I kind of believe we moved to Cheltenham simply to be closer to it. If you can- go, you will never ever regret it.

Pearly steamed rice and Mango and Coconut Lassi.

 Bangladeshi/English vegetable samosas

Beautifully spiced chickpeas with crispy lentils, pomegranate and raita.

Just when it couldn’t get any better, the chef and his daughter brought over some complimentary kulfi-

Chocolate and coconut, pistachio, Alphonso mango and raspberry ❤

How you could possibly follow that?

Well, it was a birthday!

Chocolate Mint Tart

This a really smooth and silken pudding, which could have the potential to be bitter, as I use non-sweet shortcrust pastry. However, the addition of mint lifts the flavour, making it gorgeously intense instead. To make the pastry, use a half fat to flour ratio, adding water to form a dough. This tart is chilled, not cooked- so you MUST bake the tart case blind! Adapted from Jamie Oliver’s chocolate tart recipe.

• 300ml double cream
• 2 tsp caster sugar
• 50g unsalted butter, softened
• 200g really dark mint chocolate- I used Lindt
• 50ml whole milk
• 1 shortcrust pastry case- baked blind

Put the cream and sugar in a pan and bring to the boil.

Remove from the heat, adding the butter and chocolate.

Stir until glossy and leave to cool for 5 minutes.

Stir in the milk

Pour into the tart shell and chill for several hours.

Blog Inspiration: Chocolate Mint Fish Biscuits

This blog post is a tribute to a rather lovely blog I discovered recently called ‘Playing with Flour’. In addition to its fantastic name and beautiful photography, it has thee most gorgeous chocolate biscuit recipe.

Here is my (much messier) attempt! And check out the blog….it’s lovely!

Chocolate Mint Fish

These are crunchy chocolate biscuits with a chocolate and mint ganache, covered in mint chocolate. Brilliant. I couldn’t find mint chocolate on short notice, so I used Lindor with peppermint essence to make the filling. ‘Playing with Flour’ used these beautiful flower cutters, but I only had pigs or fish. …Since you ask, a result of purchasing a bizarre collection in which I only really needed the heart cutter. I used both, but the fish are cutest (pigs are still pretty cool though). I started with a delicate brush of chocolate, but I had so much left, and I wasn’t really trying to impress anyone- so I threw the remainder alllll over.

Crunchy Choc-Mint Cookies

Stay Unchained<3

First Job :)

This summer I got my first paid baking (ish) job…seriously seriously happy Liv.

I was hired to make chocolates, and I thought I would share the results. I had the best time mixing flavours and decorating, and am totally ready to do it again (hint). Here are some of the best pictures I took over the two months. ❤ Enjoy.

This is a stack of my creations ❤

This is a close up of my Hazlenut, Orange and Caramel drizzle slab 🙂 Crunchy

Here is Chocolate and Ginger Hearts, and a Marbled Mint Slab……pretty

These are salted chocolate with pretzel pieces- credit to my American for these ❤

Gold brushed salted caramel popcorn, trying some other designs 🙂

So there it is….should anyone feel the need to hire a chocolate maker…….you know where I am!

❤

Stay Unchained 🙂

P.S. Planning a big blog entry for the MINUTE my dissertation is in…..hang in there!