Spumoni Macarons

 I love spumoni ice cream especially from the Old Spaghetti Factory. I thought I'd take the flavors, chocolate, cherry and pistachio and make macarons this week. These macarons have chocolate and pistachio shells and are filled with a cherry Swiss buttercream.  I also made chocolate cherry macarons.

Macarons are finicky. As you can see above, the one on the right was overbaked and turned out a little brown. The one in the middle was underbaked and also didn't sit out long enough to form a firm shell and the one on the right was too big because I didn't trace circles on the parchment. Macarons are affected by temperature of the air, temperature of the oven, recipe, baking time, amount of mixing, age of egg whites, and length of time the batter sits out.

I used a recipe for Italian macarons for the pistachio shells. I used ground pistachios as well as ground almonds. This recipe heats the sugar, egg white and water and then adds it to more egg whites and whip it into a meringue before mixing it into the other ingredients. I used a recipe for French macarons for the chocolate shells.  This recipe combined the egg whites and sugar and then mixed in the other ingredients. It was much easier and yielded better results.

I traced the circles onto the parchment before piping the batter on. The chocolate ones still turned out slightly smaller than the pistachio. I rapped them on the table a few times and let them sit for 30-45 minutes till as skin formed. I read that it's better to overbake them a little than underbake. Underbaking will leave hollow, fragile macarons. Overbaking may dry them out more but it will fix itself in the fridge. Aging egg whites, I leave them in the fridge for a couple of days but if I'm pinched for time I will microwave them for 10 seconds. I've also read that adding powdered egg whites to your recipe works well too. But do not use meringue powder. It's not the same thing.