The week of chocolate continues

Midst the chocolate mania, it dawned on me that I had miss Kanelbullens Dag on the 4th of October, I got a bit sad. I try to remember the Swedish things which I still dearly love and kanelbullar is definitely one of them! I have promised myself to make a batch this weekend. They are perfect for the winter time when you get in from a long day and it's cold outside, you curl up with some tea and a warm kanelbulle! They freeze brilliantly too.

But still it's chocolate week and armed with my extortionate tin of match I decided to make a batch of macaroons with the green tea and use Green and Black's 70% cacao to make a dark chocolate ganache.

I swapped my usual Delicious Magazine recipe and used The Pink Whisk's one. But I decided to make a change to it and make it a Swiss meringue to see if it would be more stable.

Preheat the oven to 140c, organise your piping bag and the baking sheets.

110g egg whites (I also used Two Chicks because it saves on wasting yolks!)
75g caster sugar
125g ground almonds
175g icing sugar
1 tsp of green tea match powder

I used a bain marie to beat the egg whites with the sugar. You beat them until the sugar has fully dissolved, you can check this by rubbing the mixture between your fingers. Once done, pour it into another bowl or your standing mixer, beat it until the mixture has cooled and is stiff.

You can pulse the icing sugar and ground almonds in a food processor to make sure they are as fine as possible before folding it in. I skipped this part...oops. If you want smoother macs then definitely do this part.

Gently fold the icing sugar and ground almonds in with the meringue, I do this in three stages and make sure you check the consistency now and again to prevent the mixture to become too runny.
Once you are happy with the mixture, fill a piping bag with a round nozzle, ensure your baking sheet is stuck to your baking tray with some mixture and pipe circles. Then bang the baking tray on your worktop to knock the air out and let them sit for 15 minutes to form a skin. The recipe calls for 30 minutes but I normally only do 15 minutes.

Once in the oven, leave them for circa 13 minutes. My oven is ghastly so the feet came out a bit burnt unfortunately. I brushed some gold dust on mine once they cooled.

I made the ganache by mixing 140ml of heated double cream (what I had left) with 100g of G&B's dark chocolate and one tablespoon of golden sugar. Once cooled I piped it to sandwich the macaroons.

They were pretty awesome and beautiful looking, perfect accompaniment for the GBBO. I was sad to see Danny go, we thought John should have gone, last week even!

Hope you are having chocolate galore-y week as well:0)

 

Ciao! x