Chicken Farm Special Project: La vie n'est pas toujours en rose.. O-La-La.. Macaron: Macaron au chocolat avac caramel

As the name suggests, I really had a hard time while making macaron for this project, T T. Well, it’s all my fault haha, because as I told you before, the keys for successful macaron are egg whites and the temperature.

Not, that I try to do anything harder then before, I just too tried to think clearly ^ ^”. I made 4 batch of macaron before making this one.
First and second, I made pistachio macaron, and both of them are weird. Actually the first one is not bad at all, but I made some mistake, so I had to try again before posting the recipe. I forgot to put the sugar into the egg white (all of them went into the almond powder, >*< , I made French meringue), but it came out very good. So I think I need to made it again more properly, and the second batch turned out to be the disaster. So I made it again, the third and forth are coffee macaron. The third, I just set the wrong temperature, and the forth one, the egg was not old enough. So, you can see that I really had a bad time (well, la vie n’est pas en rose, haha, it’s true). Anyway, I never wanted to give up, I started collected the egg white again, and waited. I just made this macaron today, and yes, I can make it and I feel very good now. This recipe is very easy to make, and if you never make the macaron with Italian meringue method before I suggest you should try this one. Because the chocolate in the base will make save the macaron from cracking easily.

Macaron au chocolat et caramel
Makes 30

For the macaron base
68 g	almond powder
68 g	icing sugar
25 g	egg whites
27g	Chocolate 78% cocoa mass

For Italian Meringue
75 g	caster sugar
17 g	water
25 g	egg whites

Caramel filling
70g	sugar
30g	whipping cream
50g	salted butter

Preheat the oven to 170°C.

Mix the macaron base:

Melt the chocolate.
Sift together almond powder and icing sugar into a bowl, put the color, melted chocolate and egg white into the bowl. Use a pastry scrap or spatula to bring everything together. Set aside.

Make the Italian meringue:

In a sauce pan, put the sugar and water and bring to boil over medium low heat.
When the syrup reaches 114°C, start whisking the egg whites.

The syrup is ready when it reaches 120°C; pour it over the egg whites and continue whisking until cold.

Make the macaron:

Mix together the base and Italian meringue.

The mixture should be softer and very glossy, a little stiffer then cake batter..

Spoon mixture into a piping bag fitted with a 5mm nozzle. Pipe or spoon mixture into 2.5cm rounds onto baking paper-lined (or Silpat) oven trays. When you’ve pipe out all the macarons lift each baking sheet with both hands and then bang it down on the counter (you need to get the air out of the batter).

Bake for 10 minutes (can be longer, depend on your oven). Remove from oven and cool on trays. Slide a knife under each macaron to release.

Make the caramel filling:

Put the sugar in a heavy saucepan, place the pan on medium heat and cook undisturbed until the sugar begins to melt and caramelize-you’ll see a few wisps of smoke coming out of the sugar. Reduce the heat to low and stir occasionally so that the sugar melts and caramelizes evenly. While the caramel is still very pale add cream to the caramel at arm’s length, averting your face—the caramel will boil up and may splatter out of the pan.