Red velvet macarons.

Delicious as a lighter sweet treat

I recently purchased a cook book about all things macaroons. It was so interesting and contained lots of detain, however it let me down taste wise. This is why I have decided to invent my own recipe, taking inspiration from flavour compounds of this book ,so it is still useful to me.
 Red velvet cake is one of my favourites so macarons should be even better. I found that I can't get the mixture to turn completely red (please tell me if you know how!) but the colour I made it still looks good enough to eat. If you want a more cheesy filling don't use as much icing sugar as I have.
   For this recipe you need 1-2 baking sheets with an edge and silicone mats (you can even get macaron mats to guide you with the shape, Lakeland has a good one).
Makes about 20 pairs


Ingredients:


For the shells

• 100g/4oz ground almonds
• 100g/4oz icing sugar
• 2 teaspoons cocoa powder
• 4 medium egg whites
• 100g/4oz cater sugar
• 5 drops red food colouring

For the filling

• 400g/1 lb icing sugar
• 50g/2oz butter, at room temperature
• 100g/4oz cream cheese (regular Philadelphia is the one that I can find in popular supermarkets)
• plain chocolate, to grate

Method:

In a food processor, blitz together the ground almond, icing sugar and cocoa powder for 3 seconds, four times. Sift the mixture onto a square of baking parchment.

Using an electric hand whisk, whisk the egg whites until they form stiff peaks. Add the caster sugar, a tablespoon at a time, until everything is incorporated and the end result is stiff and glossy. Next fold in the sifted ingredients in 4 batches, this is called the macaronner. Towards the end, add the food colouring and fold in until the colour is uniform.

Spoon the mixture into a piping bag, fitted with a large (1cm) round nozzle and pipe in equal sized discs (4-5cm is the desired size) onto the prepared baking sheet(s). Leave to stand for 20 minutes while you preheat the oven to 105oc.  Bake the macarons for 15 minutes then increase the oven temperature to 160oc and bake for another 8 minutes, leaving the oven door slightly ajar so that the shells don't colour too much. 

Remove from the oven and pour cold water under the silicone mats and leave the macarons to cool completely. Now they should prise off the mat easily and the bubbly foot should still be intact.

For the filling, beat together the cream cheese and butter until light and creamy. Sift in the icing sugar in four batches and mix until just combined. Pipe onto the base of a completely cool macaron shell, grate some of the chocolate on top of the filling then sandwich together with another shell. Repeat this for the rest. Place in the fridge for them to glue together properly or just eat straight away. YUM!