I'm feeling much better after yesterday's mediocrity. Granted, I haven't gone running and with the weather (and a rest day desperately needed to help the body heal) I'm not likely to. I've gone to the grocery store and bought one ingredient and per normal forgotten another. Key lime fudge will just have to wait.
The macaron, however, will not. Yesterday I made my first macaron and today I finished the ganache and cut the pate de fruit and sandwiched them together until I ran out of ingredients and patience. Mostly I ran out of the ganache, which probably means I was putting too much in each sandwich. Oh such a horrible thing to have extra white chocolate / spiced whipped cream goodness in between two cookies that are so much richer than I was expecting.
I made my first cookies much as instructed, except I used pasteurized egg whites. I let them come to room temperature for about an hour (and had measured them and stored them in tupperware the day before).
The ganache I made by boiling the cream with a cinnamon stick and then grating in a little nutmeg (and adding some ground cloves) to the mix. A little of the pumpkin pate de fruit, and they were good to go.
I did have a bit of breakage putting these together, but these rejects were still delicious! I am thinking that I will make pumpkin ice cream and either add the leftover macaron cookies to the mix or I will make little pumpkin macaron ice cream sandwiches.
All said, I'm glad that I finally got around to making these. With the low humidity in New England and a bit of patience (and using the digital kitchen scale for something other than checking my available yarn), these were not nearly as difficult as I imagined. I plan on bringing a couple of these in to the chocolate shop on Monday for the gang, but the rest we will slowly eat over the week. A nice alternative to cake for dessert!
