Coconut macaroon madness

No macaroony blog would be complete without coconut macaroons! 

When I think of macaroons, I always think of French macaroons, which I guess we should all call 'macarons' except it sounds a bit poncey. But there are other types as well and coconut ones are often found in England, Scotland, the USA and Germany. 

The interwebs tells me that Australians put jam in the middle of their coconut macaroons but I think they're just trying one on - I've never seen that. 

By the way, the interwebs also tells me that the word 'macaroon' comes from the Italian maccarone, or maccherone, a verb meaning to crush or beat - because you need to crush the almonds so finely. Before food processors were invented this would have been a bummer of a job, no wonder they named the end result after it. 

Anyway, coconut macaroons start off with a basic meringue of whipped egg whites and sugar.















You add a bit of almond meal, a lot of coconut and get a sticky, moist mixture that you shape roughly into balls. It's hard to do neatly because the coconut bits stick out everywhere.

I used Nigella Lawson's recipe from How to be a Domestic Goddess, thanks Nigella.

She gives quantities for 8 largeish macaroons... I needed about 30 small ones, so I doubled the mixture... and ended up with 66!!

So Nigella's macaroons must be the size of a small Shetland pony.

2 large egg whites
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
100g caster sugar
30g ground almonds
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
250g shredded coconut

Set oven to 170C. Beat egg whites until frothy, then add the cream of tartar and beat to soft peak. Add the sugar gradually until the mixture is at hard peak and glossy. Fold in all other ingredients and spoon onto baking trays lined with baking paper. Bake for 20 minutes.

Coconut joy!

Portrait cupcakes

It's a small step from doing 'people' cupcakes to doing actual portraits of people you know. This is an off the wall idea for thank yous, birthdays or other occasions where you really want someone to feel special.

Warning, they may just end up thinking "What the?!.... my face isn't that round... and is my nose really that pudgy??!"

So pick your audience, but hopefully they will get a laugh out of it.

Quick tip is that it really helps if they have some distinctive feature, like long dark hair or massive eyebrows or glasses or a beard... there are limitations to portraiture accuracy on a cupcake so you need to have some simple feature that stands out and says to them that this isn't just a random 'face'.

I did these because I wanted to say thank you to some very talented and generous people who opened the amazing MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) in Hobart. It was a question of what do you give someone who has everything, I thought a set of cupcakes with a picture of each of the prime movers and the lettering that makes up the MONA branding would maybe raise a smile. Who can say no to a cupcake!

This is the final presentation. I stuck the bases down with museum gel (this was not a deliberate reference to their museum, just an old curators trick of using it whenever you want something to stick fast but be removable).

Oddly enough the faces weren't the most difficult bit. The lettering was. This was because I wanted to copy exactly the particular font and colours of the MONA brand.

I ended up tracing them from a MONA catalogue onto baking paper, then placing the baking paper on top of rolled fondant and scoring through it very gently with a knife. Then I removed the paper and cut the scored lines.

One tip is leave the letters half cut out - as in the picture - to harden up a bit before you try to remove the void spaces. Otherwise they will stretch and deform.

The 'O' was cut using two sizes of circle cutter.

Melting moments and ricciarelli: flour and butter v almonds and eggs

If we put macaroons on one side for a minute – I know it’s hard – my other favourite bickies are melting moments and ricciarelli.

Melting moments are apparently an Australian invention based on Scotch shortbread, they were first mentioned in an Australian cookbook from 1928. 

 

 They contain the same ingredients as traditional shortbread (flour, cornflour, sugar, butter) but whereas shortbread is baked in slabs or ‘cakes’ and stamped with a pattern, melting moments are small bite sized drops.

At some stage after the 1950s they began to be sandwiched together with jam or icing.

I like using a vanilla flavoured biscuit with a sharp lemony icing/filling. The icing is butter, icing sugar and lemon juice. It needs to be spreadable but stiff, so that it dries hard and sticks the bickies together. 

My recipe is from a book called '100 Cookies' but you can google recipes, they are all pretty similar. 

Ricciarelli (pronounced ‘richie-a-RELli’) are a type of macaroon I guess. They are Italian biscuits made of ground almonds, sugar and egg white and they are moist and chewy rather than crisp’n’crunchy. They can be flavoured with lemon rind which works really well. 

 

I just googled the name and I found out they are named after an Italian prince, Ricciardetto della Gherardesca from Volterra, who apparently invented them when he came back from the Crusades in the 14^th century. 

I am now imagining a knight in full armour clanking around a massive castle kitchen trying to grind almonds really finely while Baldrick beats the egg whites. 

Anyway, here in the 21^st century there is a great recipe for them in Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess cookbook, thanks Nigella. You get a very sticky mass that you need to hand-shape into diamonds (using icing sugar to stop them sticking to your hands) and place on a baking tray to harden up before baking. 

You are supposed to leave them overnight but I always get impatient and try to bake them same day. 

Here is Jade helping out in the process by trying to speed up the drying with a hairdryer.

Unfortunately it didn’t really work and while you still end up with yummy biscuits, they look swollen and malformed, not the little neat diamonds that you want. So, always best to follow the recipe – sigh.

Friday night caramels

*Grandparental advisory: do not give these caramels to your nan. They will pull her fillings/false teeth out and it will be very embarrassing for everyone involved*

These remind me of my Grannie Gracie actually, not quite sure why - she never made anything like this. But she always used to line her cake tins with heaps of paper and I think wrapping the caramels in twists of baking paper like I did was what made me think of her.

caramel setting in the moulds

Thanks to the Frankie Sweet Treats cookbook for the recipe and Instagram for getting across in picture form the old fashioned simple quality of the caramels.

Only ingredients are brown sugar, castor sugar, glucose syrup, condensed milk and butter, boiled to soft ball stage (115C).









It hardened quite quickly in the mould. I turned it out when it was still warm and cut it into squares with an oiled knife, then hand-shaped them into oblongs. The consistency when cool is very firm, but will yield when pressed between thumb and forefinger.

I am looking forward to taking these in to work on Monday and finding out which of my co-workers has loose fillings :-)



Recipe:
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup caster sugar
3/4 cup glucose syrup
3/4 cup condensed milk
1/4 cup unsalted butter
pinch of salt

Line a rectangular container with greaseproof paper.
Combine all ingredients in a saucepan over low heat, stirring, until the mixture comes to the boil. Increase the heat to medium and boil until you reach 115C or soft ball stage (about 10-15 minutes). Stir constantly, the mixture is very prone to sticking to the bottom of the saucepan and burning. Remove from heat and pour into containers. When the mixture has cooled and firmed up, cut into squares with oiled scissors or an oiled knife. Wrap in twists of baking paper.

Sean the Sheep Cupcakes

This would be a perfect present for any stray New Zealanders you come across ahaha... sorry.

I was trying to come up with a design for Will Tatchell who runs Van Dieman Brewing.
I wondered about a beer cupcake but I wasn't sure how to do it, so in the end I fixed on Sean the Sheep because Will's brewery is on a farming property, and there is a sheep that was bottlefed who follows him around.

For Sean's head I looked at an old Wallace and Gromit alarm clock. Jade was confused to find it on the kitchen table but guessed straight away that it was possibly cupcake related.

The green background (left) works better than the purple one below because it looks like grass. The cachous were just to glam it up a bit but were possibly a mistake.

It would also be fun to do a more three dimensional Sean by modelling half of his body and making it look as if he was jumping out of the cupcake.

My problem though with that type of solid modelling is that you end up with so much icing relative to the amount of cake, it's not really edible.

Baa-aaaa, happy eating Will.

ssss

Australia day macaroons

It was a Frenchy kind of Australia Day at our place with no lamingtons or pavlova in sight, Sam Kekovich would have been very disappointed (although we did have lamb).

These are coffee flavoured with a coffee buttercream filling.

I had some trouble getting the flavour how I wanted it without upsetting the texture of the mixture. Using a shot of expresso coffee is a beautiful flavour but it makes the buttercream separate and curdle.

First batch of buttercream went straight in the bin, second batch I tried a syrup flavouring, Bushells coffee and chicory essence, it comes in a tall glass bottle in the coffee/tea aisle of Coles, costs about $3. It's strange stuff that smells quite bitter, but it worked really well and I got a flavour and colour that I was ok with.

So the coffee buttercream is still a work in progress as I am playing around with quantities and ingredients.

Here's a tip, if you get something right when you're experimenting, bloody well write it down straight away - I made a really good coffee cream a few months back and have never been able to do it again.

I have discovered that piping the macaroon mixture onto the oven trays is heaps easier than trying to spoon it out evenly. I am using disposable piping bags from the supermarket, how easy is that?

One Eureka moment I got from reading my new book on macaroons is that you need to leave them for half an hour after piping but before baking, to form a skin on the top. This is how you get that classic shape of the smooth upper with the little rough 'foot' on the bottom.

These chocolate macaroons were made about a week before we ate them but were still in really good condition after being kept in the fridge. In fact having them cold from the fridge seemed to add a denseness to the filling which improved them. I think they would last quite well for up to two weeks.

Proof that following a recipe can achieve results similar to those pictured in the recipe book! Thanks Jose Marechal for writing such a great teaching textbook on my favourite food.

A pirate with eyepatch and earring

Pirates are fun to make and not very hard - thanks Paris from Planet Cake for this design which is in the book Planet Cake Cupcakes. 

This little fellow is a bit grumpy but not very scary. I will have to work on more scary facial expressions. 

The Planet Cake design had only one strap coming off the eyepatch (the one on the left) but I thought he needed a bit of balance so I put another one on the other side. The straps are a bit too wide and next time I will cut them finer. 

The cut on the cheek adds a bit of interest to what is a very simple design, this was just painted on with red food colouring and a fine paint brush. 

If you were doing more than one pirate it would be fun to do the headscarves all different colours.