Nutty Cherry Chocolate Cake

Someone riddle me this: everybody says they love cake, but everybody also says that they don't like sweet stuff. Alright. That's just not working for me. How can you like cake and not like sweet things? I get it, there can be too much sugar in a cake, but come on! Talk like that just makes my job harder, because every time I bake a birthday cake I sit at home, wrecking my brain on how to make a cake that's still an actual cake without eliciting moans of "It's good, but....". I think with this one, I succeeded. Everybody told me they loved how it was chocolatey, but not overly sweet. Thank god they all didn't know the list of ingredients, because while there's not a lot of sugar in it, there's definitely a lot of fat. But hey, you can't have everything, people. The taste needs to come from somewhere....

Nutty Cherry Chocolate Cake

For the cake:
250g butter, softened
5 eggs
250g white sugar
3 tsp. baking powder
200ml milk
400g hazelnut meal
(a couple of tablespoons of breadcrumbs for the pan)

For the filling:
1 glass (about 700ml including the juice) morello cherries
250g Mascarpone
400g sour cream
25g vanilla sugar (yes, 25g. That's all the sugar it needs.)
300g Nutella (...and that is why 25g of sugar is all this cake needs)
200g whipped cream

For decoration:
about a dozen fresh cherries
50g melted milk chocolate
250g chopped almonds

1. With an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugar until well combined. Separate the eggs and add the egg yolks one at a time and beat about a minute after each addition.

2. Mix the flour and the baking powder and add to the butter mixture. Beat until well combined.

3. Lower your mixer setting to a medium speed and slowly add the milk, then the hazelnut meal.

4. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold unter the batter.

5. Line the bottom of a 9-inch spring pan with baking paper and generously grease the sides, then sprinkle breadcrumbs over the sides.

6. Bake at 200°C for about 45 to 50 minutes.

7. With an electric mixer, beat the mascarpone, sour cream, vanilla sugar and nutella until well combined.

8. Whip the cream and fold into the mascarpone mix.

9. Once the cake is completely cooled, cut into two layers.

10. Add a thin layer of the mascarpone mix onto the bottom layer.

11. Thoroughly drain the morello cherries (maybe even put them on some paper towels for a bit, so the excess juice gets absorbed) and add a layer on top of the mascarpone.

12. Add more of the mascarpone mix on top, then put the second layer on top.

13. Add a thin layer of mascarpone to the top layer of the cake and put into the fridge to set a little (about an hour or 2).

14. Pan-roast the chopped almonds until they turn golden. Let them cool down completely.

15. Once the cake has set a little, frost the outside of the cake with more of the mascarpone. Gently press the chopped almonds to the outside (leave about 50g of the almonds for the cherries).

16. Melt the milk chocolate, dip the fresh cherries into it and let them set for a minute. Once the chocolate has slightly set, dip the cherries into the leftover chopped almonds and put into the fridge to set.

17. Decorate the top of the cake with the fresh cherries.

Enjoy!
♥ Nicole

Chocolate Raspberry Cake (a.k.a. the botched Kinderriegel Cake)

So last week…or the week before…no idea anymore…I celebrated my birthday for the second time (not that I’m still at an age where your birthday is something you look forward to) and I wanted to make one of my all-time favorite cakes: a Kinderriegel Gateau. You know Kinderriegel? Milk chocolate bars with a milk center? Heavenly. And the cake seriously tastes just like the bars. Love it.

But knowing me, you all know what comes next: Right. Didn’t work out the way I planned it, because for some reason, my chocolate cream curdled. Which it has never done before. Sometimes I really wish I knew more about how baking worked so I actually knew why this stuff keeps happening to me so I can avoid it in the future.

Anyway. So, I had to improvise (really, this blog should be called “A study in improvisation” or something). Fortunately, I still had some stuff at home to make a raspberry cake out of the chocolate cake and that one at least turned out rather yummy if I’m allowed to say so myself.

Raspberry Chocolate Cake (with a hint of Kinderriegel)


For the cake:
150g all-purpose flour
150g white sugar
150g butter
1 p. vanilla sugar (if you don’t have any, use ½ tsp vanilla extract)
100g melted chocolate (in this case: Kinderriegel if you have access to them)
6 eggs
2 tbsp. dutch cocoa
2 tbsp. baking powder

For the raspberry filling:
400g sour cream
500g quark
100ml whipped cream
100g white sugar
3p. vanilla sugar
3-4 cups of raspberries (fresh or frozen)
gelatin (6 to 8 sheets or 1 p. of gelatin powder)


For the decoration:
a few raspberries
about 100-140g of melted (milk) chocolate (5-7 Kinderriegel)


1. Beat the butter with an electric mixer until it’s light and fluffy. Slowly add half of the sugar, the vanilla sugar, melted chocolate and cocoa and mix well after each addition.

2. Add two whole eggs and four egg yolks.

3. Mix the flour and baking powder and add slowly.

4. Whip the egg whites to a stiff peak, slowly adding in the rest of the sugar, and fold into the batter.

5. Line a spring pan (28cm) with baking paper on the bottom and use some cooking spray or butter to grease the sides lightly. Pour in the batter.

6. Bake on 180°C for about 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.

7. Let the cake cool for half an hour, then cut it into two layers.


8. Beat the cream to stiff peaks.

9. Put your raspberries through a food processor, leaving a few aside for decoration (I used frozen raspberries, so of course I had to thaw them first). I don’t mind eating raspberry seeds, so I didn’t do anything else, but if you don’t want the seeds in your cake or are looking for a smoother finish when frosting the cake, strain the raspberries through a sieve after puréeing them.

10. If you don’t have gelatin that works on cold liquids, warm up your raspberries (in a microwave or on the stove) and add the gelatin, stirring constantly until it’s completely incorporated. If your gelatin works on cold liquids, you can stir it in without having to warm up the raspberries.

11. Beat the quark and sour cream with an electric mixer, adding the sugar and vanilla sugar while beating.

12. Add the raspberries to the quark and beat until well incorporated.

13. Fold in the cream (if you had to warm up your raspberries, wait until the mix has cooled down a little).


14. Spread about 2/3 of the cream onto the bottom layer of the cake and put the second layer on top. Use the rest of the filling to frost the outside of the cake. If you feel like your filling isn’t firm enough to frost the cake immediately, put the cake into the fridge for an hour or two before you start frosting.

15. Put the cake into the fridge for a couple of hours so the filling and frosting can set properly.

16. Melt the chocolate, but let it cool down until it starts to thicken again before pouring it over the cake. Use an angled spatula to even it out if necessary.

17. Decorate with some raspberries or whatever else you like.

Enjoy!
♥ Nicole

The 12 days of Christmas...y food: Day 12 - Gingerbread Tiramisu

Hallelujah. I made it to day 12 before Christmas Eve. Never thought that would happen. Heh. Looks like I should set myself goals more often.

A couple of years ago I did some advanced job training and at the facility where they held our seminars, they served us gingerbread tiramisu for dessert one day. And the first thing I thought was "Why haven't I thought of that before?" And really, why hadn't I? Anyway. The tiramisu they served there tasted okay, but I thought I could improve on it a little. Namely, by adding copious amounts of alcohol. And other stuff. Plus, I like my tiramisu a little lighter, so I don't use eggs and I don't like to just use mascarpone, so I usually mix it with quark. If you can't get quark where you live - don't worry, it tastes fine with just mascarpone and cream as well. Just substitute the quark for mascarpone and cream (1:1).

This is going to be my Christmas dessert, by the way (On all three days. Because as usual, I made way, way too much for one person to eat.) So looking back at what I used for the recipe I'd say you're looking at either three very, very big desserts (that I'm gonna have problems finishing after a roast) or six desserts that'll be slightly easier to finish.

Gingerbread Tiramisu

Ingredients:
about 10 pieces of gingerbread (and by gingerbread, I actually mean German "Lebkuchen", the normal chocolate covered kind without wafers)
1 cup of freshly brewed, but slightly cooled down coffee
200g mascarpone
200g quark
100g whipped cream
50g sugar
2 p. vanilla sugar (or 1/2 tsp vanilla extract)

Optional:
about 100-150ml Bailey's (I used the hazelnut flavored Bailey's)
about 50ml hazelnut syrup
cocoa powder or chocolate shavings for decoration



1. Whip the cream with one package of vanilla sugar. (If you use vanilla extract, don't add it to the cream.)

2. Put the mascarpone, quark, sugar, 1 package of vanilla sugar (or alternatively, the vanilla extract), about 100ml of Bailey's and a couple of tablespoons of the hazelnut syrup in a bowl and whip with an electric mixer until well combined (the Bailey's and hazelnut syrup is really to taste - you like it stronger, put in more, you like your flavor very subtle - put in a little less).

3. Fold in the whipped cream.

4. Cut the Lebkuchen into smallish pieces (mine were about 3 to 4cm).

5. Mix the coffee with Bailey's and hazelnut syrup to taste.

6. Start layering the different components into glasses or dessert bowls, starting with a layer of Lebkuchen. Sprinkle a few tablespoons of coffee over the Lebkuchen - just enough to soak it. Add a layer of mascarpone cream. Start over. Depending on the size of your glasses and how thick you make each layer, you should get about two to three layers of each into a glass.

7. Top with cocoa powder or chocolate shavings.

Enjoy and happy holidays!
♥ Nicole

The 12 days of Christmas...y Food: Day 11 - Biscoff Bark

Okay, I've run out of cookies. Bad planning on my part I guess. I thought about just using some cookies I made last year to fill the last two days, but then again - there's more Christmas-y food where the cookies came from, so I decided just to give you that.

This Biscoff Bark is something I've been making for the past three years or so, so I guess it's becoming a bit of a tradition. I've changed the composition around a few times everytime I made it, so I have a favorite combination (milk and white chocolate), but if you want something to set off the sweetness of the white chocolate, you could always use dark chocolate or a mix of dark and milk chocolate instead. I, personally, hate dark chocolate, though (Chocolate has to be sweet. Period.), so I'm gonna stay with the milk chocolate from now on.

I love the biscoff flavor in the chocolate (adding the biscoff also makes for a softer chocolate that basically melts in your mouth, but what gives this bark its finish are the freshly roasted hazelnuts. It's amazing! And if you're willing to share, it makes for a quick last minute gift.

Biscoff Bark

200g milk chocolate
100g white chocolate
50g cookie butter / biscoff spread
100g whole hazelnuts
Speculoos Hagelslag (if you can find some)


1. Put the whole hazelnuts on a baking tray and put them in the oven at 180°C for about 10 minutes. (You'll realize they're roasted when the skin starts coming off).

2. Wrap the hazelnuts in a towel and rub them together so their skin peels off. (I took mine out of the oven a little too soon this time, so that's why mine still have their skin on the pictures. If you have the same problem, put them back in for a couple of minutes, but make sure you don't burn them!)

3. Use a big knife to chop them up a little (halves are fine). Set aside.

4. Melt both the milk chocolate and the white chocolate in separate bain-maries.

5. Once the white chocolate is melted, add the cookie butter and whisk (with a spoon) until the cookie butter has melted into the chocolate and you get an even consistency.

6. Line a baking tray with baking paper and pour the milk chocolate on top. Spread it a bit either by tilting the tray or using a spatula. Mine is usually about half a centimetre in thickness and gets a little thinner around the edges.

7. Using a spoon, drop dollops of the white biscoff chocolate onto the milk chocolate and swirl with a fork.

8. Immediately add the hazelnuts and, if you can get some where you live, the speculoos hagelslag.

9. Put into the fridge for about an hour to set.

10. Break into big chucks.

Enjoy!

♥ Nicole

The 12 days of Christmas Cookies: Day 10 - Buttercream Blondie's Spiked Mint Milanos

Today, I'm gonna cheat a little. I hadn't planned on baking any more cookies after I was done with the first batch, but I saw these last week on Buttercream Blondie's blog and I just had to try them. However, since she only posted them last week, I don't really want to take her recipe and repost it here, so instead I'm just going to send you over to her blog. Her cookies look a lot more appetizing than mine anyway.


I made a couple of alterations to the recipe, though, because for me, the amount of flour in the recipe didn't work. That could be due to the fact that I was a little more generous with the baileys than the recipe stated, though. I had to add at least 100g more to make the dough workable.

I didn't have any mint-flavored baileys at home either, so I used the regular kind and just added a few drops of peppermint aroma, which works fine. You can still taste both the baileys and the mint when you eat the cookies.

I also spiked the ganache with baileys (because you can never have enough baileys in your cookie once you find out you actually can have baileys in your cookie), which also worked fine. So if you like baileys: go for it.

Personally, I have no idea, though, how she got all her trees to look the same. Mine all came from the same cookie cutter, too, but they differ more than a little in size and shape (which made it a bit of a challenge to always find 2 that went mostly together).

And: storing them in the fridge is kind of mandatory if you want the ganache to last for more than a couple of days, but take them out a while before you wanna eat them. I think they taste a lot better and are a lot more flavorful at room temperature than directly out of the fridge.

So, go over there and try them out. You know you want to!

Enjoy!
♥ Nicole

The 12 days of Christmas Cookies: Day 9 - After Eight Cookies

Geez, I really need to hurry up this week if I want to get this done before Christmas Eve, don't I? Sorry, but Office Christmas Parties, baking Christmas gift and stuff kind of got in the way. But I'll get it done, I promise. However, as I feared in the beginning: I'm short two types of cookies. But do not fear, I have other Christmasy food to show you on the last two days.

Today's cookies I've made for the past three years or so, usually due to popular request by others. Myself, I always find them a little underwhelming to be honest. Others seem to love them, though. In the three years I've made them, I've also never managed to make them look appealing. The first year, the chocolate kind of fell off. Last year, it was too thick and I had the worst trouble piping it. This year, I went for dipping the cookies in chocolate, but the food coloring really messed the chocolate up. Maybe that's why I don't like them as much, because it's not like they taste bad or anything. So if you're a master decorator (or even a mediocre decorator - you just need to be better at it than I am), you might be able to save them.



After Eight Cookies (a.k.a. "Chocolate Mint Cookies")


For the cookies:
80g After Eight (or any other mint-filled chocolate)
125g softened butter
50g powdered sugar
a pinch of salt
1 egg
250g all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp dutch cocoa

For the decoration:
100g white chocolate


1. Chop up the After Eight into small pieces.

2. Mix the flour, baking powder and cocoa. Set aside.

3. Using a handheld mixer, cream the After Eight with the butter, powdered sugar and salt.

4. Add the egg and beat until the mix is nice and fluffy.

5. Slowly add the flour and continue working the dough until it's fairly homogenous.

6. Take it out of the bowl, cover it in clingwrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

7. Preheat your oven to 160°C.

9. Roll out the dough to about half a centimetre thickness and cut out whatever shapes you like. (A word of caution, though: either you need to refrigerate the cut-out cookies for half an hour before baking or you should choose fairly simple shapes, since the dough tends to not keeps its form that well.)

10. Bake for about 12 minutes.

11. Melt the white chocolate in a bain-marie and either dip the cookies in it or pipe some swirls on top of the cookies.

Enjoy!
♥ Nicole

The 12 days of Christmas Cookies: Day 2 - Praline Coins

Another one of those things that I have a real sweet tooth for is what we Germans call nougat and what everyone else seems to call hazelnut praline (but to be honest, there's hardly anything sugary that I don't have a sweet tooth for.) For some reason, though, you only seem to be able to get the good stuff around Christmas and Easter, while throughout the year, most nougat-y goodness seems to vanish from the stores. So I always need to stock up around Christmas. Unfortunately, this results in stocking up on body fat as well, but hey - it's winter and I freeze easily, so there. Two birds, one stone.

So this year (after a somewhat botched attempt last year that I don't wanna talk about), I decided to actually make some cookies incorporating my beloved nougat-slash-praline and this is how it turned out.

Praline Coins

For the cookies:
250g all-purpose flour
50g sugar
50g dutch processed cocoa
1 egg
125g softened butter
50g dark chocolate

For the filling:
100g hazelnut praline

1. Melt the dark chocolate

2. Mix the sugar with the cocoa and, with an electric mixer, whisk together with the butter until well combined.

3. Add the melted chocolate and the egg and whisk for a minute or so.

4. Add the flour and mix until you have smooth dough (if you started mixing with your , you should switch to the dough hook before adding the flour). If it doesn't come together completely, knead with your hands for a couple of minutes.

5. Wrap the dough in cling film and refrigerate for at least half an hour.

6. Roll out the dough thinly and cut out circles (mine are about 5 or 6cm in diameter). Take one half of the cookies and cut out a star in the middle. Those are gonna be the cookies that go on top.

7. Bake for about 20 minutes at 175°C

8. Once the cookies have cooled down, melt the hazelnut praline in a bain marie.

9. Spread a dollop (a little less than a teaspoon) on each bottom cookie, but make sure it doesn't completely cover the cookie, but leave a little space around the outer edges.

10. Take a top cookie and press it lightly onto the praline mixture. Now the praline will spread to the outer edges (which is why it's important to leave a little space when spreading the praline).

11. Voilá!

Enjoy!

♥ Nicole

The Most Unprofessional Professional Cake Ever (or: how Nicole totally overestimated her skills)

So at my old workplace I was known for the birthday cakes I made for colleagues at least a couple of times a month. So when the company's 60th anniversary rolled around, they asked me whether I'd feel up to making the cake for the anniversary party - with 350+ guests, even though I don't even work there anymore. And totally floored by the honor of being asked I was like "Sure, no problem at all. Cake for 350 people? Coming right up."

(c) Nina Stiller (edited by me)
To give you a bit of a frame of reference here: until last Wednesday, I had worked with fondant exactly twice. Both times on cakes smaller than an average spring pan. I had never made a tiered cake. And the biggest cake I had ever made was probably my former boss's birthday cake, which had 4 layers, but was still the size of a normal spring pan.

You see where I'm going with this, right?

The party was Friday night, so I went shopping on Tuesday (and seriously, the looks you get at the grocery store when you buy 150 eggs and 8kg of butter - I mean, it's not that uncommon), was planning to bake on Wednesday and fill and decorate the cakes Thursday and Friday. I was totally convinced I had bought way too much stuff for the cake.

First mistake.

(c) Nina Stiller
Wednesday night I had my first mini-breakdown, because of course I had way too little cake for the size I had planned for. Plus, my go-to-chocolate cake recipe that even has "perfect for layer cakes!" scribbled in the margins of my recipe book failed me for the first time ever. Seriously, "Murphy" should be my middle name. So around midnight I finally had a plan worked out on how to rescue the cake...which I discarded again around 7am the next morning. I finally decided on losing a tier and just making the bottom tier out of two different cakes to give it some height. Then I got my ganaches out of the fridge to start filling the first cakes.

Any my white ganache had totally curdled. Again. (This always happens!! What am I doing wrong?!) So two hours of chopping chocolate all for nothing and no plan B in sight. About 5 pounds of emergency buttercream and 6 hours later I had finally filled all the cakes and crumbcoated them. Of course since all my cakes were totally falling apart, I had to completely scale back on my cream fillings and up the buttercream/ganache portion in the hopes that that stuff would basically glue them together.By this point, everything non-cake-essential (meaning: all my normal groceries) had to leave the fridge because there wasn't any space left.

So sometime that afternoon I started covering the first cakes in fondant and - as I had pretty much expected by that point - that didn't go as smoothly as I had planned either. I was using Satin Ice instead of Wilton fondant for the first time and first found it very sticky only for it to completely crack when I covered the cake with it. I'm pretty sure it was me doing something wrong, I just have no idea what it was. Did I knead too long? Not long enough? Should I have used some GumTex to make it more pliable? No idea.

Anyway. Since my crumbcoating skills leave something to be desired as well, the fondant was anything but smooth, but by that point I honestly didn't care anymore (okay, that's a total lie, but I couldn't do anything about it, so I had to move on). After I had covered three of the layers, I wanted to color a bit of fondant green for the decoration and let me tell you, I used almost an entire bottle of gel coloring, but do you think the silly stuff turned the green I wanted? Of course not. It stayed a minty pastel instead of turning a nice dark green. I could have lived with that, but when I started rolling the fondant out and cutting strips to cover the cake with, suddenly the fondant wasn't all cracking and sticky anymore - noooo, now it had the consistency of chewing gum. So instead of a nice even strip of green around the cake, I had a completely uneven...something. I attached the fondant paper anyway and just hoped everyone would be drunk enough at the party so they wouldn't actually see it.

(c) Nina Stiller
When I got up Friday morning, I felt like someone had run me over. Holy sh..., I've never been this sore from baking a cake. It felt like I'd built a house, not a cake. I still had to cover the bottom layer with fondant and finish my decorations, though, so I had to get up anyway....only to realize that I had no space anywhere to roll out the fondant as big as I needed to cover the whole layer (not too mention: how do you roll out fondant to that size (about 100x80cm) while keeping it even? And how do you move it after you've managed to roll it out?) In the end I decided to cover the two cakes separately, also because they would fit back into the fridge until the caterer picked them up that way, which was a plus considering the temparatures (but also looked very, very amateurish).

Shortly before the caterer came by to pick up the cake I arranged the bottom layer on the cake board we had made - only to realize when we wanted to bring the cake outside that the board didn't fit through my kitchen door. Let me tell you, I was dying inside when we had to start tilting the board to get it through the door, but alas, we made it without the cake ending on the floor.

I will spare you the story of how the caterer transported my poor cake. Let me just say, I refused to be left behind and insisted on him taking me with him, because I didn't trust him with the cake after I'd seen the vehicle it was transported in (not to mention that he ripped of half of my specially printed fondant paper while putting the cake in the car - thank you very much). I'll also spare you the story of what happened when we got to the party. Let's just say I was pretty close to a complete meltdown before the cake was finally assembled and found it's rightful place on the dessert buffet.

In the end, I was happy the cake arrived (mostly) safe and sound and people seem to have liked it (it even ended up being featured in the trade press as part of the anniversary coverage), so all's good. I still think I should have done a lot better, though, and I'm still kind of embarrassed by all the flaws the cake had.

So the next time someone asks me to make a cake for 300+ people and I'm tempted to say yes? Please someone whack me with a baking tray.

♥ Nicole

Macarons with 4 different fillings

Aaah, macaron. My old foe.

For the longest time, I was scared to even try to make macarons, because all the recipes I read sounded like being able to make a good macaron involved about 278 steps that needed to be exactly right in order to get an edible cookie. And I'm really not good with following directions exactly. Nevertheless, I tried my luck twice and both times turned out, well, inedible.

Back then, when I tried to find out what had gone wrong, I was left with about a dozen possible explanations: Hadn’t I aged the egg whites long enough? Did I maybe use 126 grams of egg white instead of 117 grams? Did I whip them 45 seconds too long? Of course in hindsight, all of this was stupid. Now, I’m pretty sure the first time around I just sucked at macaronage and didn’t fold the mass long enough and the second time I simply took them out of the oven way too early, so they fell apart.

How do I know that now? I found Stella’s Macaron Mythbuster post. And I could have kissed her. A pastry chef telling everybody to chill out, because making macarons does not involve magic or any kind of elaborate preparation? Exactly what I needed to try again.

So after making the Portuguese Croissants for brunch, I had a lot of egg whites left over that I didn’t want to throw out, so it was the perfect opportunity to try again. This time, though, I tried to stick to Stella’s recipe as closely as possible and didn’t add colors or anything, because it was about trying to get the macaron right first. Colors and more elaborate flavors than vanilla are reserved for next time.

And lo and behold, they turned out beautifully. Alright, alright – maybe they could’ve been a little bit prettier, but that was me being totally unable to pipe them right. They tasted really nice, though and I’ll definitely stick to this recipe from now on, at least for almond and vanilla flavored shells (I’m planning on trying peanut butter shells next, though, as soon as I can get my hands on some peanut flour).


Plain Vanilla and Almond Macarons with 4 Different Fillings

[Shell Recipe from Brave Tart]

115g almond flour
230g powdered sugar
145g egg whites
70g sugar
mark of 1 vanilla bean
2g salt

1. Sift the almond flour and powdered sugar together. Set aside.

2. Mix egg whites, sugar, mark of the vanilla bean and salt and whip until it forms firm peaks, about 8 to 10 minutes, depending on how fast your machine works.

3. Dump the almond-sugar mixture on top and fold it into the egg whites. Every few turns, spoon out some of the mix and drop it back into the bowl. The mixture has the right consistency when it takes about 20 seconds for the spoonful to incorporate itself into the mix again. If it stays sitting on top, keep folding, if it incorporates quicker - well, you've screwed up. [Stella's recipe says it takes about 40 folds, mine took almost twice as many, so it's important not to simply count, but really check the consistency!]

4. Fill about half of the batter into a piping bag with a round tip and start piping circles onto a baking tray covered with baking paper. [Now I have a macaron silicone sheet, so I don't have to worry about size, but if you don't have one of those and want equally sized circles, find something round about the size you want your macarons to be, and use it as a pattern to draw circles onto your baking paper before you start piping. Don't fill your circles to the very edge, because the macarons will spread a little bit.]

5. Rap the tray on the counter a couple of times (to disperse air bubbles) and bake at 150°C for about 20 minutes. (Right away. You do NOT have to let them sit on the counter. I actually had two sheets and one had to wait 20 minutes until the other was done and the macarons I put into the oven right away had nicer feet than the ones sitting on the counter for 20 minutes).

6. Let them completely cool before you start filling them.



Fillings

I had actually made some coffee chocolate ganache for the filling, but the stuff took forever to cool down and harden and I was on a timetable, so I had to improvise. I filled some of them with lemon curd, some with peanut butter mixed with a couple of teaspoons of melted chocolate, some with raspberry jam and some with a mix of raspberry jam and coconut bread-spread (for the Germans: REWE's "Glück der Tropen"). The fillings all went really well with the subtle vanilla flavor of the shells and the peanut-butter-chocolate ones tasted especially great on the next day when the flavor had had some time to settle.

Bon appetit!


♥ Nicole