Welcome to How To Cook That, I'm Ann Reardon and today we're going to make this beautiful
macaron tart. Now it has chocolate mousse in a tart shell at the bottom, then an orange
creme brulee with a raspberry glaze over the top in the middle and then passionfruit macarons
around the outside.
Now you don't have to make all aspects of this dessert, you can choose just one and
make that but this is in response to those of you who have been asking for an entremet
dessert which has all these different elements to it.
And thankyou to YouTube and Screen Australia for flying me over here, you'll see that I
am not at home. I am in LA and I'm here as part of a grant with YouTube and Screen Australia.
You'll see some videos on my channel starting in January, there's a series of 4 videos called
The Sweetest Thing which have been produced and filmed professionally for my YouTube channel
as part of that grant which is exciting, so I hope you'll enjoy those when they come.
When I film and edit it's a really fast turn-around but when you have professionals involved it's
a really slow turn-around so you'll see those later.
Now the first thing we need to make for this dessert is the brulee part of it and we need
that to freeze so that we can glaze it, so we'll make that first.
The ingredients you'll need for that are cream, egg yolks, sugar and grated orange rind. Add
the orange rind and the sugar to the cream.
And all the recipe quantities can be found on the howtocookthat.net website in grams
and ounces and cups and I'll put a link to that below.
Heat the cream mixture until it just starts to boil then remove it from the heat and let
it sit.
Preheat your oven to 300F or 150C.
So once that's been sitting for 15 minutes so you've got that orange flavour really infused
all through, we want to whisk it with the egg yolks. So the first thing we'll do is
whip that up.
Pour in a little bit of your cream.
Whisk it through and then pour in some more.
Now these bowls, we want to bake them in the oven in another bowl with water in it. And
what that does is that it just makes sure that it has an even temperature the whole
way through and it doesn't go over the boiling point of water.
Because we've got those egg yolks in there we don't want our creme brulee to curdle.
If it gets too hot it's going to do that which means it will split and you'll have little
chunks that look like cooked egg and then a layer of oil which is not what we're going
for.
So what I want you to do it grab another bowl and then put a dish cloth or a teatowel in
the bottom, a clean one, and put the bowls on top and that just stops them sliding around.
We're going to add this into here and just strain them through a fine sieve and that's
because we want to get rid of the little pieces of orange rind that we have in there so that's
it's nice and smooth. There we go.
Now what we want to do now is put that in the oven and then once it's in the oven we'll
pour the water around the outside. It just makes it easier not to spill any as we go.
Once they are ready they will be set but just a little jiggly in the middle still. Pull
them out and then let them cool on the counter and then put them in the freezer because we
want them to freeze so that we can glaze them.
To make the pastry shell we need flour, butter, sugar, one egg and some vanilla. Using you
fingers and thumbs rub the butter into the flour until it looks like fine breadcrumbs
like this.
Add the sugar and stir it through and then add in the egg and the vanilla. Mix them really
well just push down using the back of your spoon until it comes together and starts to
form a dough.
Place it between two sheets of plastic wrap and roll it out.
Then peel off one layer of the plastic and use the other one to help you lift up that
pastry and flip it onto the base of your tin. Then peel of the other sheet of plastic and
use a knife to trim around the edge. Then place that into the base of your tin.
Roll out the remaining dough into a thick snake then use the rolling pin to roll it
flat to make a long rectangle.
Use a ruler and a pizza cutter to cut two long strips for the sides of the pastry shell
and just cut right through both layers of the plastic wrap. Peel the top layer of the
plastic off and then working with one half at a time lift the strip and add it into the
tin around the edge. Making sure that it is joining onto the base. It has to be sitting
right down there. Smooth it out using the back of your finger then remove the plastic
wrap and trim to size so that it fits and makes the full circle there.
Add a circle of non-stick baking paper to the base and more around the sides. Next add
ceramic baking beads or you could use rice or some beans here. And this just weighs it
down so it bakes flat so the pastry doesn't puff up in the oven. Then bake in the oven
at 350F for about 10 minutes. Then remove the ceramic baking beads and the baking paper
and bake it again and this is so that it can crisp up. That should take around another
10 minutes.
Once it is cool line the pastry shell with melted chocolate, now you don't need to temper
this. It is just there to provide a barrier between the pastry and the mousse so that
the pastry stays crisp and crunchy.
Next for the passionfruit filling for our macarons you'll need passionfruit syrup and
milk chocolate. Tip the chocolate into the syrup and just microwave that for 30 seconds.
Then stir it really well, then give it another 30 seconds and stir again, you'll see it's
nearly melted but it has a few lumps but it is important that we stir it in between, you
can't just put it in for the whole time. Give it another 20 seconds more in the microwave
and then stir again and that looks good. Place that in the fridge to chill.
For the macaron shells you need icing sugar, sugar, almond meal, egg whites and colour,
make sure you use a powdered colour not a liquid one or your macarons won't work. 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 they won't go through. Some people have told me they've spent an hour
trying to sieve their almond meal, you need to have a course sieve. If there are any little
chunks of almonds left at the end you can discard them.
Now that is done you can whisk together the egg whites and the sugar. Now I want you to
keep whisking until it is thick enough that you can turn the bowl upside down without
it falling out. Then whisk it again for another two minutes. Now I do have a timer on my mixer
and I make sure that it's 2 minutes. You want to make a dry meringue and then you can add
your colouring at this stage too. So it should look like this, it's really quite dry.
Pour the almond and icing sugar mixture in and begin to fold it in. Now this is the step
with macarons which most people seem to have trouble with. The first thing you want to
do is get rid of all the dry bits. So fold the bottom and then if you can see dry bits
there just scrape across to mix them in, fold down the bottom and scrape across to mix them
in. Now you need to fold some more. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, scrape off your
spatula so you don't get some over mixed bits that are on the spatula. And then keep folding
around and down and over the top and keep folding until you get like a lava consistency,
so when you drop some off the spatula it should slowly move down. Now if instead of folding
you just stir, stir, stir, stir you're going to get a liquid, it will just really drop
the air out of it and it's not going to work. So make sure you're folding not stirring.
Place at mixture into a piping bag and using a template pipe little circles of macaron
mixture onto non-stick baking paper. You can print out a template from the howtocookthat
website I'll put a template that's this size on the recipe recipe for this particular dessert.
Slide them onto a baking sheet, and then you can reuse that template for the next one.
And then bang the tray on the counter several times to get rid of any air bubbles, now if
you don't do this they will crack so make sure you do this as soon as you have piped
them.
While I'm here in LA, LG asked if I wanted to check out their new LG Pro Bake convection
oven. So I thought I'd test them with this recipe because macarons are so finicky on
oven temperature. Now they reckon in their new oven you can put two trays of things in
at once and the temperature will be even the whole way around. I would never do that with
my oven at home with macarons because what happens is the bottom tray always cracks,
the top tray is fine but the bottom tray no good. So I thought I would put it to the hardest
test I could think of and bake two at once, so I'm a little bit nervous but let's see
if it can handle it.
The top tray is looking gorgeous.
And there you, they're done, let's take out the top tray and then let's have a look at
the bottom tray - oh my goodness they're perfect little macarons, not one has cracked. I honestly
did not expect that. I need one of these ovens.
Let your macarons cool completely and then fill them with the passionfruit ganache. This
tastes both of chocolate and passionfruit at the same time. Then add the lids, and before
you fill them it does help if you match similar sized ones together so that when they go on
just look right.
For the glaze we need glucose or corn syrup, sugar, red food colouring if you want a brighter
coloured glaze, white chocolate, gelatin, cornflour, raspberry puree and I just made
this by heating some frozen raspberries with lemon juice then straining it through a fine
sieve to get rid of the seeds. Some cream and water.
Add two tablespoons of puree to the cornflour and two tablespoons to the gelatin and stir
it through immediately. The gelatin will absorb the water in the puree and it will soften
up the gelatin nicely.
Place the water, sugar and glucose syrup into the saucepan and stir over high heat. And
you want to keep stirring that until it just comes to the boil and you can see that all
the sugar is dissolved. You shouldn't be able to see any more sugar crystals there.
Then add your cream, then the raspberry puree, followed by the cornflour mixture. Keep stirring
that continuously and it will start to thicken up. And once it thickens you want to keep
it on the heat for another minute to let all the starch granules in the cornflour burst
so it doesn't taste floury in your mouth. Remove it from the heat and then stir in the
gelatin. The heat of the mixture will just melt that.
If you want a bright red then add in some food colouring.
Pour the mixture through a sieve onto the white chocolate.
Then after a minute stir it through and the white chocolate will now be melted and will
stir through all the way there and your glaze is done. You can just set that to one side
to cool.
For yummy chocolate mousse inside that goes inside the tart shell you'll need cream, milk,
chocolate, gelatin, sugar and you'll also need some egg yolks. Add some milk into the
gelatin and stir that through and again this is just going to bloom the gelatin so it absorbs
the water and softens it so you don't get lumps when you add it later.
Whip your cream using electric beaters until you get soft peaks, you don't want to over
whip it. And then set that aside on the counter so it can come to room temperature.
In a saucepan place the milk, sugar and egg yolks and heat them until they get to 186F
or 86C. Then immediately remove it from the heat and stir through the gelatin until it
is melted.
Pour this mixture through a sieve onto the chocolate, just like we did with the glaze.
And then Leave that for a minute and then stir it through until it is well combined.
And once that mixture is room temperature we want to fold it through the whipped cream.
Pour it in and fold it through, keep scooping right down to the bottom and keep going round
to evenly distribute the chocolate through the cream. Then pour that into the pastry
shell to fill it with the mousse and place that in the fridge to set.
To get the frozen brulee out of the bowl place it in some hot water. And this will met the
outside layer so you can tip it out.
Your glaze by now will be set, so you want to microwave it for about 20 seconds just
to melt it a little bit but you don't want it hot or it will just slide right off your
dessert because it will melt a layer of the dessert.
Put the brulee on a glass over another dish and then ladle the glaze over the brulee and
let the excess drip off, give it a little shake and a tap it to get rid of any air bubbles.
If you want a more intense colour you can freeze that for 10 minutes and then give a
second layer of glaze over the top.
Tidy up any drips from around the base. And then very carefully lift it up and place it
into the centre of your mousse.
Now add your macarons one at a time around the edge.
And your dessert is done.
Subscribe to How To Cook That for more cakes, chocolate and desserts, click here for my
channel, here for the recipe and here for last week's gingerbread house video.
Make it a great week and I'll see you all on Friday.