Pistachio and chocolate macarons

Hello everyone. I'm back from my travels and slowly getting back to baking and blogging. It was an awesome trip and I had an amazing time! I was quite jet lagged on return and it has taken me quite a while to get back into the swing of things which is why things have been quiet on my blog and twitter.  I will post a few pictures from my travels when I get my photos organised but for now it's back to baking!

As it's St Patrick's Day I wanted to make something green and decided to tackle my baking nemesis... macarons. I've never made them before but I did attend a class recently with my AlphaBakes co-host Caroline which you can read about here.  I've always had a fear of making them having read many horror stories and I'm afraid this is not a success story :( 

I used the recipe that we were given in the class (which produced great results).  Basically you need egg whites, sugar and pistachios.  I used fresh eggs as I didn't have time to age the egg whites but added a pinch of cream of tartar and salt to the eggs.  The macaronage looked good and I had high hopes before they went in the oven. I let them sit for 30 minutes and they actually formed a skin. After baking, they looked slightly brown but some of them had "feet" and I thought success!! Then I tried to peel them off the silicone mat and they literally fell to pieces :( I'm not sure if I was meant to grease the mat first and I notice that Caroline had similar problems with her mat. The ones I piped freehand onto a baking sheet turned out ok - they're nowhere near perfect but they are passable.  I suspect my macarons were undercooked but they were getting quite brown or perhaps my oven temperature was wrong. They are quite fiddly little things!

So I decided to try them again but made them greener this time. However, I initially put grape violet colour instead of green as I saw the "G" and assumed it was green!! You can see a few purple streaks but I'm sure you would not have noticed if I didn't tell you.  I also decided to use the other side of the macaron mat to make mini macarons. This time, I could peel them off the mat easily but they didn't have feet on them! 

The plus point was that they tasted really good as you can really taste the pistachio in the macaron shells and it paired well with chocolate. I will definitely attempt these again (probably not for a while) so watch this space! Hope my baking mojo returns :) 

I am entering these to AlphaBakes as the letter for this month is "M" 

and also to We Should Cocoa hosted by Chocolate Teapot as the theme this month is green

 silicone mat 

 egg whites 

 pistachios blitzed with icing sugar - you can't really see the green but it was definitely a light green. 

 slightly overzealous piping! 

 "freestyle" as I ran out of space on the mat 

 result from round 1 (these were from the shells I piped on the baking sheet

 i'm pretty sure those are little feet! 

 

broken shells from my first attempt and some from the second attempt 

 round 2 - greener!

  reverse side of the mat 

 mini macs ready to be filled

 final result 

I made a chocolate ganache for the filling - heat 4 tablespoons of cream and add 100g chopped chocolate and 25g butter and stir until mixed and smooth. Sorry forgot to take a picture of the ganache!