Lavender macarons

Lavender. Betcha first thought was a bar of scented soap. Either that or dried petals in a pouch for smelling purposes. Or scented oil for aromatherapy. You get where I'm going right.

Anyways, I'm not here to talk about lavender soaps or whatnots. I'm here to talk about lavender macarons. Yeps. Floral macs. And I'm not referring to the ubiquitous rose flavour. My Sis bought quite a bagful of these dried lavender buds, and since I have no idea what to do with them (since a small spoon is more than enough to perfume anything really), I decided to incorporate them into macarons form.

Lavender macarons

Cream, lavender and white chocolate to make lavender ganache; Macarons

When I think of lavender, I'll giggle. There's a funny story to it. Someone *coughs* I know *coughs* believes that eating anything lavender-ish makes men feminine. So, we tricked that "someone" into eating these purple macarons, bluffing him that it's yam flavoured. The incredulous thing was, he actually believed us. So when I asked, "So how does the yam macaron taste? Can you taste the yam?" He actually munched and said, "Mmmmm, yeah can taste the yam." Speechless. (Actually I was shaking badly by then...with the effort not to burst out laughing and bust the joke.) When we told him what was it he actually ate. The look on his face was. Priceless. Eyes bulged so widely, and he mock gagged. Snigger.

I got myself some powdered red and blue colouring, so I mixed a little of each together and added to the almond meal mixture and sift it together to form this really gorgeous shade of purple. When I added the dry ingredients to the beaten egg whites, oooo, the colour was simply stunning (my fave colour is purple). (:

I was making another batch of different flavoured macarons the same day, and I thought those were sure to succeed, while these lavender ones, for some reason, I thought would surely fail cos the mixture was just too thick after I folded the dry ingredients into the egg whites. Alas, the other macaron totally flunked, while the it was the lavender macarons that resembled macarons. Thank gosh. The feet arn't very pronounced, but oh hey, at least they have feet and resemble macs. The other flavour didn't resemble macarons at all and I was pretty crushed. :(

I used the white chocolate ganache as shown here and steeped the cream with some lavender buds for about 5 to 10 minutes. After removing the buds, I reheated the cream and poured it over the chopped white chocolate. After stirring to ensure that a uniform mixture is obtained, I tasted it, thankfully the lavender taste wasn't overly strong (I was so afraid that I'll be eating soap-flavoured macarons seriously). 

The ganache turned out really weird after I whipped it. I didn't leave it to cool overnight, just a few hours in the fridge and it was quite thick and cool, so I thought it would be okay to whip it. The mixture turned out looking quite grainy and on the verge of separation that I immediately stopped beating it to prevent it from separating. I had to fridge the mixture again cos it was too liquid-y to pipe into the mac shells. I was impatient after a while, and piped it anyway, which probably resulted in my less than pretty macarons here with the oozy looking filling. Lesson learnt - never ever be impatient in the kitchen.

It's late and I gotta be in bed soon, there's still work tomorrow. Sigh. I'm still feeling a little unwell, been having a flu/cough for the past week on and off and it just wouldn't go away totally. Just when I thought I'm recovering, I just start wheezing or sneezing again. Meh. Off to get some rest now!