Piña colada macaron

Recipe

I made it up! I took bits and pieces of other recipes, and improvised the rest.

Coconut shell

Since my red velvet macarons turned out so well, I used that recipe as the starting point.

• I omitted the cocoa

• I substituted 10g of the almond flour with 10g of ground coconut

• Yellow food colouring (about 4 drops) instead of red

• Decorated with shredded coconut after it was piped, and air bubbles were popped

• Only had to bake for 14 minutes, as opposed to 16

Rum-flavoured French buttercream

This was my first time making a French buttercream. I had leftover egg yolks from my previous macaron bakes, so decided to give it a try. I used this recipe from Preppy Kitchen as the starting point.

• I only had 4 eggs yolks instead of 5, so I scaled the ingredients back 20%

• In addition to the vanilla, I also added 2tbsp of dark spiced rum

• Whipped like hell to try and correct for a lumpy consistency

Pineapple jam

I had about a cup of crushed pineapple in my freezer, so I made a simple jam out of it.

• 1 cup crushed pineapple

• Sugar to your preferred level of sweatness

• Splash of lemon juice

Bring everything to a boil, stirring constantly. Blend with a hand mixer. Let simmer until it thickens.

How it turned out

The elements came together just fine. It was a perfectly acceptable macaron, but the flavours were off. I don't think folks would eat it and immediately think piña colada.

• The shells cracked where I sprinkled coconut. I also think it could have done with a bit more ground coconut in the batter

• The rum buttercream lacked a punch, and the texture was lumpy

• The jam didn't scream pineapple as much as I had hoped it would

What I learned

I need more practice with French buttercream. I'm not sure what went wrong, but the silky smooth texture ended up lumpy. I'll dedicate a day to making just a simple vanilla French buttercream. That way I can understand the foundations before I continue adapting the recipe.

I need to better understand how to flavour things with alcohol. The rum didn't really come through in the buttercream, which makes me wonder if putting alcohol in frosting was a good idea. I'd like to do more research on how people typically incorporate alcohol into their bakes (and how much!)

Decoration on top of the shell could cause cracking. I need to better understand why sometimes decoration on top of macarons work (like with my mocha macarons) and why sometimes they don't. The coconut seemed to cause cracks. Given that the feet didn't rise as much on the side of the coconut, I'm wondering if it has to do with weight not allowing the moisture to come out at the bottom, and it instead erupts out the top. Much to look into here!

Let overbaked macarons be. Don't use milk. I had heard that you can fix crunchy macaron shells by brushing some milk on the bottoms before assembly. I did this because there were definitely some overbaked macarons in this batch. However, I think I overcorrected, because they turned out to be quite soggy. I think next time I'll skip the milk and just trust that the filling will get it to the right consistency.