Mocha-rons - Mocha macarons with an obnoxious name

You know it's summer when my house is full of macarons. I enjoy this delicious treat at any time of the year but the combination of sweetness and light texture feels just perfect during the sometimes hot but always humid days of summer. So you can expect many more posts of a similar nature, including hopefully one with the wonderful and hilarious decidedlydelicious.

As an affirmation of my ability to control things in my life, even in the smallest way possible, I have given up chocolate for a month, it's a good thing that I don't tweet because all it would say is 'chocolate, chocolate, want chocolate,' at the moment. Before starting this ridiculous and masochistic journey I did however enjoy quite the final hoorah and these were a part of that.

I wanted to experiment with a coffee macarons concept, and I always like playing with the macaron shell that so many people revere and respect because, well why not. The playing with the shell took a couple of forms but the best was the sprinkle of cocoa powder as it made the macarons look like the frothy top of a coffee drink. So the chocolate filling was the obvious glue for the conceptual mess, plus who doesn't like coffee and chocolate together?!

Can I have a medium Americano and one large cup of macarons ;)

Mocha Macarons

125g Ground Almonds
175g Icing Sugar
2 tsp Instant Espresso powder (This has to be one of those over-priced powdered real coffee things)
3 egg whites (aged)
75g White Caster Sugar
3/8 tsp cream of tartar

Cocao Powder to decorate

Chocolate filling of choice ( I used nutella, but that was mostly out of laziness/desire to get these in
                                               my mouth faster)


In a clean bowl beat your aged, cold egg whites and cream of tartar until light and frothy, add the caster sugar slowly and beat until you have made a beautiful meringue.
Sieve together the ground almonds, icing sugar and coffee powder. Once thoroughly sieved and combined then add this to your meringue and mix until the mixture not longer forms peaks.
Pipe the mixture onto your parchment paper lined cookie sheet. Attempt to keep the macarons the same size.

Once you have piped all the macarons onto the cookie sheets (this mixture fills about 2 cookie sheets) then decorate with cocoa powder. This can be done which ever way you feel like, for one sheet I sprinkled cocoa powder delicately over the macarons but on the other I literally just threw cocoa powder all over the cookie sheet (feeling like a modern artist I might add) and they both turned out pretty well. Finally allow the cookies to sit for one hour before baking for 10-12 minutes at 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4.

Let the macarons cool on the parchment paper but off the cookie sheet, remove carefully and pipe a small amount of filling in between two cookies before sandwiching them. Then enjoy which you can see I was when I initially started this post, ah three days ago, how I miss your chocolatey flavours =)