Welcome to How To Cook That, I'm Ann Reardon and today we are making a giant macaron cake
with layers of chocolate cake, ganache, macaron, rich salted caramel and buttercream on top.
There is no fondant in this cake.
To start with make one and half times my rich chocolate cake recipe in two trays and the
recipe and quantities for that are on the HowToCookThat.net website and I'll link to
that below.
For the ganache all you need is chocolate and cream.
Pour the cream over the top of the chocolate and microwave that for 30 seconds, stir, 30
seconds stir until it is smooth and glossy and yummy and then leave to cool to room temperature.
To make the macaron layer you'll need egg whites, icing sugar, almond meal and sugar.
Add the sugar to the egg whites and then sift together the almond meal and the icing sugar
using a coarse sieve, if you use a fine sieve the almond meal won't go through.
Once that's done whip up your egg whites and sugar on high speed until they are stiff enough
that you can turn the bowl upside down without it falling out.
Let's test that ... let's tip it upside down, yep, we're good.
Now whip it for another two minutes to dry it out a bit more.
Add in the dry ingredients and start to fold them together, making sure that as you're
folding you wipe off the spatula every now and then and wipe down the sides of the bowl.
This just makes sure that you're scraping all of that in, you're not getting any unevenly
mixed mixture because that would cause the macaron to crack.
Once everything is combined, continue to fold, scooping right down to the bottom and up over
the top and then stop and have a look what it looks like when you drop some off the spatula.
It needs to really slowly start to smooth itself back into the rest of the mixture.
If it just holds it shape, it's not ready you need to fold it some more.
And keep going and keep folding until it looks a bit like this.
Place that mixture into a piping back and pipe a big spiral onto non-stick baking paper,
this is much bigger than baking little macarons.
I have a circle cut out underneath the baking paper just to give me a rough guide as to
the size of this.
Lift up your tray and drop it on the counter to get rid of any air bubbles and do that
a few times on each side.
And then repeat that piping so that you end up with four discs altogether and then just
bake those in the oven.
They will take longer than normal macarons because they have to got to cook all the way
through to the centre.
To make the salted caramel you need sugar, water, cream and glucose syrup.
Add the water to the pan with the sugar and then tip in the glucose syrup.
If you can't get hold of that you can use light corn syrup instead.
Stir that over high heat until the sugar is dissolved and then wash down the sides of
the pan using some water on a pastry brush.
And what this does is it just gets rid of any sugar crystals that are on the edge and
if you leave them there it can make the caramel crystalise out, it will go like fudge instead
of a nice smooth caramel.
Once the bubbles start to slow and the mixture goes golden it's nearly ready.
You need to watch it closely because we want quite a deep caramel but we don't want this
to burn so just stand at the pot and watch it.
As you see it starting to get a bit deeper, that deep golden colour looks good, that will
have a deep caramel flavour so pour in the cream, a little at a time, keep your hand
out of the way so that rush of steam doesn't burn you.
Add in a bit more of the cream and then stir that around.
You'll have like a hot, sweet cream and then a thicker sugary mass at the bottom.
You want to keep stirring really well to make that all one consistency.
Then add a candy thermometre to the pan and heat that up to 240F.
And then immediately remove it from the heat and pour it into a container.
Now if you don't have a candy thermometre you can put a drop of it onto a cool surface
and see how thick that caramel is when it cools down.
After stirring the cream through it though it took only about 30 seconds for it to get
up to 240F so you should be able to just eyeball it and do it without a thermometre.
Add as much salt as you like and stir that through your caramel but do not taste it because
remember this is very, very hot.
Make up one batch of vanilla buttercream and add some gel colour to make it the shade that
you want your macaron to be.
And again the recipe for that is on the howtocookthat.net website and there's videos showing how to
make buttercream in all different flavours there.
Once your cakes have cooled, level off the tops to m ake them nice and even and then
out of each layer you want to cut out an 8-inch circle and a 6-inch circle of cake.
Smear some ganache onto a cake stand or a plate to stop the cake from slipping and then
add a 6-inch layer of cake.
Now top that with a good lashing of thick, yummy salted caramel all over the top.
And then add a Macaron upside down on top of that.
Now smother than in ganache.
I couldn't make a giant macaron cake just out of cake, it needs to have that macaron
taste incorporated into it so that someone who loves macarons will love this cake.
Then top that with your 8-inch circle of cake.
For the centre filling area I'm going to use the other two macaron discs but I want to
make the filling a little bit smaller than the shell of the macaron.
So just use a circle and cut it down to the size you want it to be.
Now sandwich those two together with more of that thick gooey caramel.
And for those of you who have been asking, these sparkly silver nail wraps are called
Sugar Sweet and I'll put a link below to where you can get some for yourself.
Next you want to cover the whole think in ganache so that it looks like the filling
on our macaron.
So cover the top and then cover in all the sides there and smooth it around.
Now add some of the pink buttercream across the top of the cake and then place that ganache
coated caramel filled macaron on top in the middle.
Now for the top half of our shell.
Cover the 8-inch cake in a thin coat of buttercream on the top and the sides.
Once you've done that you want to flip it onto the cake.
Now there's not really and easy way to do this you just have to do it fast.
Just be bold and flip it over onto the cake and peel off that paper.
Take your macaron, turn it upside down and add ganache all over it and place that onto
the cake.
Ganache the final 6-inch layer and add that upside down on the very top.
Now to make this look a bit more macaron shaped, you're going to need to cut around that top
layer of cake, angling it down towards the edge of the macaron shell that we've got there.
And then once you down that with both shells we want to cover them both with a thin layer
of buttercream, and this is the crumb coat.
And it's called that because it's catching all of those fresh cake crumbs.
If you're using fresh homemade cake it will have crumbs and that's ok because that means
it's going to be really yummy and that's why we do this crumb coat first.
Place it in the fridge for an hour or so, so that the buttercream becomes firmer.
And then add more buttercream on top and spread it out.
See how now we're not getting crumbs in our icing .
Now my secret to smoothing out the top of a rounded surface is to use a thin, bendy
strip of plastic or acetate and run it across the surface of the cake, allowing it to bend
with that shape.
And use it to just keep smoothing out the buttercream, just wipe off any excess icing
off the acetate and then just run it across again and you'll get that nice, smooth rounded
curve.
Now for our foot of the macaron place the rest of the buttercream into a piping bag
fitted with a small round nozzle and just pipe squiggly lines around that section there.
If you don't have a piping bag you can just use a ziplock bag with the little corner cut
off instead.
If you have any buttercream on the ganache in our filling there just use a knife to smooth
it off so that you can just see the ganache in the middle.
And there you have a pretty macaron cake that actually tastes of macarons so it's perfect
for the macaron lover.
Subscribe to HowToCookThat for more crazy sweet creations.
Click here for more YouTube channel, here for the recipe and here for more videos on
making macarons.
Champion of the week goes to Elvira who has made quite a few of my cakes now and is doing
a great job.
If you want me to see what you've made just make sure you put @howtocookthat in the description
on your Instagram or you can upload the photo in the comments section of the recipe post
for the world to see.
Make it a great week and I'll see you on Friday.