These Easter themed Lemon Macarons are the perfect tea-time treat. Shape them like Easter eggs, and colour them nice spring-time colours before sandwiching them together with lemon curd. Get the recipe below.
How to make macarons
The basic method for making macarons is beating egg white and caster sugar together until stiff then folding in the dry ingredients (ground almonds, icing sugar) as well as any flavours or colourings. These Easter Lemon Macarons are made using this basic macaron recipe and a couple of drops of gel food colouring. I like to make them pastel coloured but you could go more vivid if you wanted to.
To keep the flavour nice a light and zingy I chose to go with a lemon curd centre. I then dipped the edges in hundreds and thousands for an extra pop of colour!
Tips and tricks for success
Weigh your ingredients precisely
Macarons are a delicate piece of patisserie. This means that every ingredient, including liquids, must be weighed precisely. Use digital scales if you can. And yes, you even need to weigh your eggs!
Use a template
To make sure all of your macarons are the same shape or size, use an egg cutter or another egg shaped item and draw a template to help you pipe equal sized halves.
Give it a good bash
Dropping the tray a couple of times from a slight height will help to flatten the mixture and prevent air bubbles.
Let it rest
When making macarons everyone talks about the smooth top and the "foot" where the macaron meets the baking parchment. giving them a good bash helps with the flat top, as does resting.
Leave the tray of piped macarons out on the side for at least half an hour and you're guaranteed a flat top and a good foot.
The recipe
Easter Lemon Macarons
Ingredients
- 225 g icing sugar
- 125 g ground almonds
- 110 g egg whites about 4
- 30 g granulated sugar
- 1 pinch salt
Instructions
- Weigh out all of your ingredients and keep them all separate and organised right from the start! This will make your life a lot easier! Sieve the ground almonds and icing sugar into a bowl. They need to be really fine so do this multiple times.
- In your biggest bowl whisk up your egg whites with a pinch of salt until they are foamy. Slowly start adding the sugar a little at a time. Keep whisking until you have stiff peaks and the egg whites are shiny and glossy! Next sieve in the almond/icing mixture a little at a time and fold into the egg whites. The mixture should be like "lava," it should be gooey and sink into itself yet still hold itself.
- Place your greaseproof paper onto your baking sheet. A good idea is to secure this with 4 small blobs of the mixture in the corners. Put the mixture into your piping bag and pipe circles (as even as you can!) about 2cm across. If you leave a peak after piping, using a wet finger push the peak down so the tops are flat. Leave these on a counter top for at least two hours so that they form a crust.
- Finally place these in an oven at gas mark 3. They will take between 5 and 10mins on each side (in other words rotate them half way through the cooking time.)
Nutrition
More Easter Treats
Check out the Easter Recipe Archive for the full range of recipes.
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