Remember when I admitted to eavesdropping on the Mac Attack girls? Well, this time they invited me to play along in their reindeer games, and I was ecstatic!
Just a bit about the Mac Attack … it is a group of us food bloggers who want to master making the macaron. The lovely coordinators of our group, Jamie and Deeba will select a recipe and give us the challenge. This month they picked one of Helen from Tartelette’s recipes, for Violet Macarons With Violet And Vanilla Bean Buttercream.
When I am given a challenge, I always stay within the guidelines or at least I try very hard not to “break” the rules. Well, there are going to be a lot of “unfortunates” listed here. Unfortunately, I could not find the sugared violets anywhere, the only place I ever find them is Paris; but, I did find sugared mimosa flowers. Unfortunately, again, they were to hard to crack, so I decided to use sumac to give them a bit of color. Everything was going smoothly, from aging the egg whites, to whipping them to stiff peaks, to folding in my nut flour, then …… I just knew as I began to pipe my small little blobs of meringue, that this would be a fail. They were spreading across the pan like wild fire. Regardless, I decided to proceed one. Since I did not have any violets, I made a mixture of sumac and maldon salt and sprinkled it on top of each macaron before baking. Even though they were as flat as little pancakes, once they were dried, I slid them into the oven. Much to my surprise, they did grow some lovely little feet but where I had sprinkled the sumac, they sank and half of them stuck to the parchment. Since I had pretty much broken all the rules at this point, I just took it to another level and filled them with a deep dark bittersweet chocolate ganache. Despite the second macaron fail, I have to say, the flavor combination was a winner, the salty sumac really complimented the sexy dark chocolate!
7 comments