back in the game: vanilla macarons with raspberry & white chocolate ganache

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It’s been a LONG time since I made anything. I think my last venture into the kitchen was for the salted caramel & chocolate popcorn bars (yum!) like two months ago because right after that, I went into social bunny hyperdrive and haven’t really slowed down until… now.

Itching to just bake anything, I found inspiration in the unlikely form of my friend Samantha who’s here from the US for work and asked me over and over again about the “green bon bons that Blair was eating in Gossip Girl”.

Bon bons?

Green?

Que?

I had no idea what Sam was talking about but she found some website that showed Blair eating Ladurée macarons – pistachio of course – and since then I’ve been trying to convince Sam that Pierre Hermé macs are actually better (it seems Chuck did at one point buy Blair Pierre Hermé too).

I think she’s now going to buy a box of each to you know, test for herself (there’s really no other way to do it), but in the mean time it got me all thinking about macarons again. I decided to get back in the game, break out the egg whites and make some for Sam – vanilla macarons with a raspberry & white chocolate ganache.

Macarons are such funny things. They are temperamental as heck, like the egg whites have to be aged, and you have to beat it until it’s this consistency, and you have to slowly mix in the dry ingredients well but don’t mix to much! and you pipe them and have to leave them for exactly this long so the shell is this thick and bake them exactly this long.

Or else they won’t work.

But once you get the hang of it and figure out exactly how long to do each bit, they’re actually pretty easy to make. I’ve made many iterations of the matcha macarons now, and have also made chocolate ones, and will at some point venture into the more complicated flavours like salted caramel. Mmmmmm… salted caramel.

But this time around I decided on something easy-ish. Vanilla macarons don’t really mess with the core recipe, and the tartness of fresh raspberries in the white chocolate ganache complements the sweet shells perfectly.

Plus they’re hella cute, right?

Vanilla macarons with white chocolate & raspberry ganache
White chocolate & raspberry ganache:
75 grams double cream / heavy cream
30 grams white chocolate, chopped
10-12 fresh raspberries
Vanilla macarons:
100 grams almond powder
200 grams powdered / icing sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
100 grams or 3 egg whites, aged for a day at room temperature
50 grams sugar
  1. You need to make the white chocolate part of the ganache a day in advance (or at least a few hours) – boil the cream over a saucepan and pour it over the chopped chocolate.
  2. Let it sit for a few minutes for the chocolate to melt, before stirring to make sure the chocolate melts completely. Refrigerate overnight or for at least 3 hours.
  3. To make the macarons, pre-heat oven to 150°C/300°F.
  4. Mix the almond powder and powdered sugar in a bowl, set aside.
  5. Whip the egg whites until foamy, then add in the sugar gradually and continue whipping.
  6. Add the vanilla essence and keep beating until you have a fairly solid meringue. The way to check is that the meringue doesn’t fall out when you tip the bowl upside down
  7. Mix the powder mixture in with a spoon, until properly combined.
  8. Pour the mixture into a piping bag and pipe small rounds onto a baking tray lined with parchment paper. I piped about 1 inch rounds, and the macs turned out quite small and cute.
  9. Leave the macs for about 30 minutes (some recipes I have read fluctuate between 15 minutes and an hour and depends wholly on your environment) until a shell forms.
  10. Bake for 10 minutes.
  11. Remove from oven, let cool and then remove from parchment paper.
  12. When you are ready to put the macarons together, whip the white chocolate mixture with an electric mixer, adding the raspberries in one at a time. If you prefer, mash the raspberries first, but I just added them whole. Whip until the ganache turns into a thick cream. Place a drop on one macaron and match it with another side. Gently press together, being sure not to press too hard!
  13. Refrigerate in an air tight container. Keeps up for up to a week.
Quantity varies. I made 25 macarons.
Posted in: Eating In, Foodie, Recipes

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