Thursday, March 04, 2010

Dainty Passion Fruit Macarons


I had so much fun on my first batch of macarons that I decided I would give it another go. This time, joining on the Mactweets challenge: spring fling, where I was encouraged to let my favorite springtime flowers influence me in the kitchen!

Also influencing me in the making/naming of these cookies was the conversation I had with Dashing Boy a couple of nights before these were made...

Sometimes Dashing Boy talks in his sleep. It doesn't happen very often but when it does it is very entertaining and usually he says a bunch of jibberish and stuff that makes no sense at all.

On this particular night Dashing Boy had already been soundly asleep for over an hour, while I had just gotten to bed. Suddenly, I sneezed.

Dashing Boy sweetly leaned over to me and said,

"It's ok. It's more for sauces. It's not really meant for dainty things."

The remainder of the night and many moments the next day were spent laughing and laughing at such randomness.

And so these macarons are appropriately named "dainty." Because if there is anything meant to be dainty, I believe it would be a macaron.


When I think of spring and all of the colorful, fresh flowers that introduce it I think of happiness and the sun. The arrival of spring makes me feel alive.

Passion fruit- both the taste and the color make me feel happy and alive.

I was thrilled that I was able to find both passion fruit concentrate and passion fruit pulp at the Mexican market.

So first I whipped up a batch of milk chocolate passion fruit ganache- yum! Then I did my best to color the macarons the same vibrant color of delicious passion fruit.

I was pretty happy with how these turned out. But they were still lopsided- need to work on my piping technique! My biggest problem of all though was that on both batches I made half of the macaron tops cracked!


Next time I'm going to double up my baking sheets and see if that helps... Luckily macarons still taste good even when they don't look as dainty and cute!

8 comments:

Deeba PAB said...

I love the 'Dainty' murmurings of the dashing boy, and the dainty macarons you've created! Loved rteading ypur post...really cracked me up...ROFL!!! Gorgeous flavours ... and beautiful colours.
My macarons too keep cracking up, and are currently having trouble showing off their feet!
Thanks for joining us at MacTweets. Jamie & me are really happy to have you play mac-feet with us!!

Jamie said...

Oh man, is that too funny! Poor guy, now his secret ramblings are out of the bag, too! And I am thrilled you joined us for Mactweets with these pretty and deliciously flavored macs! I have been having problems with cracked tops too, so I am no help on solving this problem, but the rest of yours came out perfect!

Dashing Boy said...

I guess my secret ramblings aren't so secret. Anyone who's with me after about 11 PM is welcome to hear :)

the dainty macaroons were excellent. We took them to a party where the guest of honor was a chef by trade and he was very impressed. He said it's a very "chef" thing to do.

Passionfruit is awesome!

It looks like Mac tweets is a very supportive community! Have fun!

B said...

i love passion fruit too, but its hard to come by where Ilive. ur macarons look lovely

Bonnie said...

Jenny, Your macarons look so good! I love passion fruit, but I have yet to find a good recipe. Which recipe did you use?

Katie!! said...

haha! that post made me laugh! just wait until your baby comes out, the talking in the sleep gets worse!! nelson has said some fuuuunny things at nighttime when he got partially awoken by the baby. :)

Jenny said...

Thank you everyone for your nice comments! I'm really excited to be part of mactweets!

Bonnie: I used a basic truffle ganache recipe using 8 oz milk chocolate to 4 oz heavy cream, only I substituted 1.5 oz of the cream with passion fruit juice (strained from frozen pulp) then added another oz of juice so the consistency would be a softer and more flavorful.

So basically I used
8 oz milk chocolate
2.5 oz heavy cream
2.5 oz pure passion fruit juice

I really liked how it turned out. Next time though, I think I would add some of the actual pulp to the ganache. When I ate the ganache on its own I thought it was very flavorful but inside the cookie I felt like it need a little more of a punch!

Cristie said...

Jenny!! They were wonderful and I was so luck to get to try one. Thank you for the tasty treat. Dashing Boy is such a great guy :) We should bake together soon.