A gush of bird-song, a patter of dew,
A cloud, and a rainbow’s warning,
Suddenly sunshine and perfect blue
An April day in the morning.
Harriet Prescott Spofford
It’s the time of the month where the mac passionate folk amongst us strut our stuff… that is FEET! We host the monthly event at Mactweets, the brainchild of Jamie and me, where a bunch of us get together and bake macarons to a theme. The theme for April was ‘What’s Your Holiday?’, and it was an all encompassing one.
Whatever your celebration was, be it Easter, a birthday, Passover, April Fool’s Day (Poisson d’Avril for you Francophiles), World Health Day or Earth Day etc. My choice was Earth Day, and I almost never got there. The story is long, I don’t want to write the saga, and you certainly don’t want to read it! To cut it short, the fiddly feet didn’t appear over 8 attempts, and the ones I post today are ones I found in between, but wasn’t too happy with. They make me feel happy now though, since the filling was fun!
I’m posting them because I was egged on to ‘show my feet‘ by Mardi at Eat Live Travel Write last evening, who promised she wouldn’t laugh at my feet, and would stand by me. Jamie showed off the most amazing feet in a picture on twitter, and reasserted that she indeed is the Mac Queen!! I am still in search of a 100% macaron success rate, but am inspired (or stupid enough), whichever way you want to look at it, to keep trying on a daily basis.
The filling is the part I liked best. I wanted to make matcha macs for Earth Day, in blues and greens, but it was not to be as they spread and bubbled alarmingly like lava once in the oven. Man Friday is having a field day. He takes my failed attempts home for his son everyday, so I have an alternate to filling, stacking and hiding my epic failures.
Earth Day is a day designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s environment and is held on April 22. It was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in in 1970 and is celebrated in many countries every year. Earth Day is in spring in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn in the Southern Hemisphere. My message is simple … lets try and go local, reduce waste, recycle, save energy and water, spread the words, look at sustainable development … i.e. do our bit for the Earth! In the micro sense, I piped my macarons with recycled bags, and also recycled my failed macarons to sweeten the buttercream filling. Another good idea for failed macarons could be these Mac-Verrines!
I hung on to the failed matcha macs, made with some precious matcha from a little box Meeta brought for me at the FBC in London. Matcha is finely-milled Japanese green tea. I guard it with my life because I find the colour so fascinating. I HAD to put the failed matcha macs to some good use, so I ran them in the grinder and milled them back to powder. I made a butter-cream sweetened with matcha macaron powder, sandwiched my macs with them and came away singing! All thanks to egging on by Mardi and Jamie!!
Do stop by and look at the round up at MacTweets which shall be up later today. There is amazing creativity amongst our folk, and they never fail to impress!
Milled Nut Flour Macarons
Recipe for macarons from Ottolenghi – The Cookbook, posted here
Macaron Butter-cream Filling
10-15 macarons (I used failed matcha macarons)
1/4 cup butter, slightly soft
1 tbsp cream
Method:
Grind the macarons in a coffee/ nut grinder till fine.
Beat the butter and cream until light and fluffy. Add most of the macaron powder, and continue to beat till of the correct consistency. Add more macaron powder if need be.
Assembling:
Turn macarons so their flat bottoms face up, and match the halves for size.
On half of them, pipe about 1 teaspoon of butter-cream and sandwich these with the remaining macaroons, flat-side down, pressing slightly to spread the filling to the edges.
Allow to set in a closed box, in the fridge. They taste better after 24 hours.
♥ Thank you for stopping by ♥
Do you want to join us making MACARONS?? If you do, you are most welcome to join the ‘Attack’. You can find all the information at our dedicated macaron blog MacTweets. The rules for can be found here. You can always join us next month. Just drop us a mail or tweet.
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