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!

Joy's Unicorn Poop - Birthday NUMBER TWO

As I spent most of the previous month's meeting making bad jokes about number 2, I was absolutely thrilled when I stumbled across this whilst googling kid's birthday party baking ideas:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Unicorn-Poop/

I used my standard shortbread biscuit recipe though (see previous post), but added cola flavouring, vanilla extract and a good slosh of caramel flavouring as this is clearly what unicorn poops would taste like. I divided it into 6, and spent far too long blending red/orange/yellow/green/blue/purple colour pastes into the cookie dough. As a side note, for those who are still using liquid food colourings, I cannot recommend these highly enough:

Get them from eBay/Amazon etc. They're a little more expensive, but they last for ages, a little goes a long way and you really do get a much bolder colour without altering the texture of the cake/biscuit/icing. Anyway...

I rolled each of the 6 colours into long strands, then piled them up and kept rolling to make one really long multicoloured sausage. I chopped this up and had fun rolling each poop into a unique swirl shape. This is definitely the weirdest thing I've ever baked, and I've baked a cookie with ketchup in...

I baked them (probably at 200°C for about 15mins), and when cool, I used icing to stick multicoloured shimmer balls, white chocolate stars and sprinkles. I then sprayed with Dr Oetker gold shimmer spray and added a further sprinkling of cake glitter, for good measure. Voila! (Unfortunately I don't think the picture does the colour justice):

Cake'n'Bake Update

Hello!

It's been a while *coughsixmonthscough* since I've done one of these, and for that I hang my head in shame... Sorry!

But, Cake'n'Bake is still going strong, so here's a brief run-down of what we've been up to in the last six months!

In July we held a fairytale Picnic and raised £86.35 for Marie Curie Cancer Care:

In the August heat we decided to give our ovens a rest and go for a "No Bake" theme:

September's challenge was to bake something that shared your initials...

In October we decided to use cocktails as the inspirations for our bakes:

November was our 2nd Birthday, so we had our 2nd Birthday Party!

In December we helped Santa on his trip by baking Christmas recipes from around the world:

And for January's meeting last week we set ourselves the challenge of baking something "free-from" - here's what we came up with:

The recipes for these bakes will be making their way onto the blog soon - so watch this space!!