Whenever I’m travelling, this blog works as my cookbook. So imagine my surprise when I wanted to suggest a nice chocolate recipe for my niece’s baptism in Stockholm and I couldn’t find one single chocolate recipe here! And it’s not like I haven’t been yapping on about the endless pleasures of the cocoa persuasion, but somehow I’ve managed to avoid actually putting that into action. So sorry! Luckily I’ve found just the right recipe to make amends with on a very pretty sister blog called Cannelle et Vanille: French Chocolate Macaroons.

I have attempted to make macaroons before with mediocre results, as this mugshot shows. But when I found this recipe I instantly knew I had the key to perfection (with a few cracks and dents;-). There was just something about the details concerning the egg white and the fact that there are so many different delicious looking macaroons on that blog that made me trust the writer 100%. And it really paid off. I made the macaroons following the recipe as religiously as possible. The only change I made was in the ganache where I used dark chocolate (Lindt  70%) instead of milk chocolate and replaced the passion fruit with raspberries.

Raspberry Ganache (makes just the right amount for the macaroons)

• 100 grams dark chocolate (70%)
• 50 grams (frozen) raspberries
• 20 grams cream
• 15 grams butter
• A splash of rhum
• A blob or two of glucose
• A pinch of salt

Start by chopping the chocolate into nice little bits and set them aside in a bowl that can stand some heat and place a sieve on top. Then heat the cream and the whole raspberries in a saucepan while you mash the berries into the cream. When the berries have dissolved as much as possible and the mixture is slowly starting to boil, take the saucepan from the heat and pour the cream through the sieve and over the chocolate. You only want to get rid of the raspberry seeds, so make sure that when you have, you immediately start stirring the melting chocolate into the pink cream. When all of the chocolate has melted, add a splash of rhum and a pinch of salt to deepen the flavour and sweeten it with some glucose (or syrup). And that’s it. Now pour the mixture into a piping bag and leave it in the fridge for five minutes before squeezing it out onto your baked and cooled macaroons. I promise you, these are the best treats ever and you won’t believe you’ve actually made them yourself!

The texture and the flavour were spot on and the look very nice  if you like the rustic and not French-nazi-patisserie chef-style. But I would like to learn how to make all of the macaroons the same size and without cracks in the surface.

NOTE: I just attended a patisserie class last night (May 5th) at La Glace in Copenhagen. There we learnt, that the cracks can be avoided by, among other things, making sure the almond-cocoa-sugar mixture is completely even and mixed, before adding the meringue.