My macaron making experience - Turtle Macarons

This is our sweet section where we get down to the creative sides of constructing sweets! This blog post is going to show you my experience in making macarons for the first time ! And hopefully guide and inspire you to make your own !

A short story behind the motives for this little experiment:

It was our friends 18^th birthday coming up, and we knew she loved turtles ! I’ve also always wanted to try my hand at making some macarons, though I've heard its very important to get the fine details correct otherwise you’d end up with flat sugar cookies .

Ingredients:

At first we followed a recipe given to me from an experienced friend. Below are the ingredients:

• hershey’s chocolate powder (can be bought as costco!)
• almond meal
• pure icing sugar
• caster sugar
• 2 room temperature egg yolks
• turtle templates

Steps:

1. First we separated the yolks from the egg whites and left it in a machine whisk bowl. We then sifted through our sugar and almond meal. I had troubles because I didn’t have a proper sifter. It literally took me and a friend 2 hours to sift through 200g of almond meal.
2. Next simply whisk the egg whites for about 4 minutes (adding the caster sugar in portions every 1 minute)  till they form stiff peaks. Then fold in the almond meal and pure icing sugar mixture with a spatula.
3. Then just separate the mixture for the desired different flavours. The flavours we chose for the turtles shell were chocolate because our friend is a diehard chocolate fanatic!
4. Add this mixture to a piping bag and pipe the shapes onto baking paper (using the templates underneath). I used Microsoft word to create the shapes by memory.
5. Time to make the fillings! The fillings we chose were also a rich velvet chocolate buttercream. Set aside in the fridge till the macarons are baked.
6. Success! This is our finished baked mini turtles. Just need to pipe our fillings next.

Results

And this is our final result !  Cute turtle macaron ~(we just stuck down the macarons with honey)

And here is the birthday with her surprise turtle macarons !

Other flavours

Alternatively you can just make some plain old mickey mouse macarons ! They’re also easy to pipe and fun to share! Below are some chocolate and strawberry flavoured macarons and some earlgrey tea and honeybutter ones !