Aileen's Neapolitan Ice Cream Macarons

Neapolitan Ice Cream Macarons

Makes 10-15 macarons

Macarons

100g icing sugar

100g ground almonds

2 medium egg whites

Small pinch salt

55g castor sugar

Filling

150g unsalted butter

75g icing sugar

Quarter teaspoon vanilla essence

Strawberry jam

1. Preheat oven to 160ºC
2. Sieve icing sugar into a large mixing bowl.  Then sieve ground almonds into same bowl.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs and salt until they form soft peaks.   Add castor sugar, a little at a time, until the egg is thick and glossy.
4. Gently stir the dry mix into the egg mix.   The mix will loose some air and become loose.
5. Spoon this mixture into a piping bag with 1cm nozzle (See note at end).  The recipe recommended a plain nozzle, which I don’t own so while the end product doesn’t look like a traditional macaron, I quite like effect created by the star nozzle I used.
6. Using a macaron template (they can be bought-I made my own by drawing on baking parchment) on a baking tray, pipe small blobs onto the sheet.  Do not pipe right up until the edge of the template, the mixture will settle.
7. Tap the baking tray a number of times to remove any trapped air.
8. Leave to dry for twenty minutes.  The surface of the macarons should be smooth and shiny and not stick to your finger.
9. Bake for 7-8 minutes.  Open door to release steam, close and bake for a further 7-8 minutes.
10. The macarons are cooked when they feel firm and are slightly risen.
11. Cool completely before removing from the parchment.  If they are not completely cooled, they are more likely to stick to the parchment and break as you lift them.  Resist the urge!
12. Make up a butter icing using the butter, sugar and essence.  It’s a less sugary version of butter icing, but necessary when working with the sweetness of the macarons. 
13. To assemble, take one chocolate shell and pipe a line of butter icing around the edge.  Pop a small amount of jam in the centre and join the chocolate shell with a pink shell.

Note: As this recipe is for making Neapolitan ice cream style macarons, the mixture should be halved before piping, and the necessary colourings and flavourings added.

As I was adapting this recipe from a standard macaron recipe and was unsure of amounts I made two batches of mixture.  I coloured one batch pink using red food colouring paste and I added cocoa powder to the other mixture.  As you can guess the extra dry in my chocolate part of the Neapolitan made a thicker mixture and I didn’t achieve the trademark ‘pied’ as I did on the pink batch.  I’ll know better for next time!