Strawberry macarons

Love In The Air ....
Happy Valentine's Day

With my success with the chocolate macarons, I'm gearing myself to try out other flavours and colours of these lovely macarons.

However, without proper planning and research, it spelt trouble and failure! My attempt to replace the cocoa powder with cranberry sauce only produced flat meringue, not macarons. I first blended the almond powder and icing sugar, set aside, and followed by blending the cranberry sauce. Few mistakes, (a) cranberry sauce is not blended fine enough (there are still bits of cranberry), (b) blending almond power mixture and cranberry sauce produced very gluey batter, which make it very difficult to fold into the egg white without deflating all the bubbles, (c) continue to pipe and bake even though the batter look very unpromising.

I then proceeded to read more blog posts about macarons, and came out with the Strawberry Macarons. I was not very hopeful initially, but the outcome turned out acceptable. The only complaint that I have is the faint colour of red, and the not-so-smooth dome. Anyway, Love is not always smooth, there are ups & downs. More trials & errors in macarons, and practice make perfect!

Strawberry Macarons

Ingredients/ Method:
(Makes about 36 pieces or 18 sandwiches)

50g icing sugar
37.5g almond powder
1 large egg white, room temperature (about 36g each)
32.5g caster sugar
2 -3 drops of strawberry emulco

1) Preheat oven to 150 deg C.
2) Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper and have a pastry bag with a plain tip (about 1 cm) ready.
3) Grind together icing sugar with almond powder so there are no lumps, using blender or food processor.
4) In a bowl of standing electric mixer, beat the egg white until they are foamy. Add sugar in 3 batches and whip egg white until very stiff and firm.

5) Add in strawberry emulco to the egg white mixture and beat until colour evenly blended, about 5 seconds.
6) Carefully fold in the dry ingredients in two batches into the egg whites mixture using the mixer on low-medium speed, about 5-10 seconds . When the mixture is just smooth and there are no streaks of egg white, stop mixing and scrape the batter into the pastry bag (standing the bag in a tall glass helps if you’re alone).
7) Pipe the batter like a v-shape on the parchment-lined baking sheets. Evenly spaced one-inch (3 cm) apart.
8) Rap the baking sheet a few times firmly on the counter top to flatten the macarons, then bake them for 15-18 minutes. Let cool completely then remove from baking sheet.

Filling can be anything, I'd used nutella and peanut butter this round.

Note:
1) Smooth the piped batter if rapping the baking sheet did not give a smooth dome/ surface.

2) There's no need to rest the macarons before baking. I put them straight into the oven after they are being piped.
3) So far I use Glad's baking paper for most of my baking and these macarons can be easily removed using them too.

4) Add more colouring or emulco to have more pretty/ obvious colour.

I'm submitting this to Aspiring Bakers #4: Love In The Air which is hosted by Ellena of Cuisine Paradise for this month's theme.