Chocolate + cream cheese macaron

Recipe

Shell

• Chocolate macaron recipe - Sugar geek recipes

Filling

• Leftover cream cheese frosting from my red velvet macaron bake

How it turned out

Wonderful!

I opted to go with chocolate because I had a bit of leftover cream cheese frosting and mocha buttercream in the freezer that I wanted to use up; chocolate pairs nicely with both. This batch had the cream cheese filling.

Given the nearly identical flavours, I was essentially re-baking my red velvet macarons. (Just without the red food colouring!) I applied my lessons learned from that bake, and am really pleased with the size and smooth shell this go around.

What I learned

Ziploc bags are good piping bags in a pinch. Because I was working with small batches of leftover frosting, I didn't want to use a full 13 inch piping bag. Instead, I used a sandwich-sized ziploc bag with the corner snipped off. Sure, it didn't give the crisp definition that I would have got by adding a piping tip, but for the filling, I think it did the job just fine.

A level surface is important for piping. I folded my macaron template from the last bake so I could store it in my recipe binder. However, that meant it didn't lie perfectly flat under my parchment paper when I was piping the cookies. A few of the macarons were therefore slightly slanted, and baked with uneven feet. Still delicious (and fine for the bottom side of a macaron) just not the picture perfect cookie you may see in the windows of Paris.