Brand new flavour to try for Batch Number 11. I wanted to try a different berry with the white chocolate ganache, and settled on some blueberry jam I found at the shops the other day. The new color mixing didn't go as planned. I was going to make them blue, as I want to make some blue macarons as part of a later project. However the artificial blue color scared me a bit so I added some pink and they came out mauve. I forgot my previous rule that the color will fade after baking, so some of them were more shades of grey rather than purple after their stint in the oven.
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| Lovely shade of mauve just after piping. |
The other thing that happened was that somehow a small amount of moisture got into my food processor as I was processing the almond meal. This was terrible as the almond meal came out clumpy. I swear it was clean and dry - and shows how the tiniest amount of moisture can wreck the TPT!
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| Almond Meal Fail! |
Okay, onto some positives! The texture was very nice this time round, and because my ganache was a bit warmer and runnier than usual, the macarons matured much quicker and within 24 hours they were perfect for eating. In fact I'm going to go and have a cuppa and a macaron now ;)
Lessons Learned -
- Absolutely important to keep food processor and mixer both dry and clean, as the TPT and the meringue are both very sensitive to moisture.
- Good quality ingredients are very important. I'm not very impressed with this lot of blueberry jam so far. Next time I'm going to get fresh blueberries and make my own, but currently they are going for $10 for the tiniest punnet at my local greengrocers and I need a few punnets...... so will have to wait till the prices comes down somewhat!
Macaons are so finicky when it comes to moisture content/dryness etc etc eh?
ReplyDeleteThese look wonderful and I'm sure they taste great too!
It's a pity that blueberries are so expensive at the moment! (I work casually at Coles so I know exactly what you're talking about - Don't worry...when Summer comes around, they should have 2 for $6 specials again! hopefully!)
Artificial colouring freaks me out too so I recently sourced some dried fruit: http://www.fresh-as.com/
I used real blueberries for my blueberry macarons but the colour was very, very faint and it ended up being a light-sh purple instead of a punchy purple/blue.
Anyway, enough rambling! This batch looks fantastic! =D
Thank you so much for your comment!!!
ReplyDeleteI still find getting the exact color I want a little bit tricky (see Batch #12 Cosmic Blue Macarons - Little One thinks my friend gave birth to a baby boy because she ate one of these super blue macarons while she was pregnant!) I have got some powdered coloring that I'm going to try soon...
Also in Batch 12 I tried using frozen berries which worked reasonably well in the absence of fresh produce, albeit a bit "seedy" as they were mixed berries. I now have a bag of frozen blueberries only for when I make my macaron tower in the next month..... fingers-crossed!