chocolate almond macaroons
These are based on a recipe in the Woolworths "Good Taste Collection" Chocolate recipe book. The recipe, and my notes:
Chocolate and Pine Nut Macaroons
I've never made them with pine nuts - I mostly substitute almonds, but walnuts are good, too
100g pine nuts I use flaked almond or chopped walnuts
115g caster sugar
2 1/2 tablespoons cocoa powder, sifted I only use 2 - see below
1 egg white, lightly whisked
Pine nuts, extra, to decorate or whatever
3 tsp icing sugarI use drinking chocolate - you'll need 2 to 3 tablespoons
Preheat oven to 160C. Line 2 large baking tray with non-stick baking paper. I find they stick to any sort of baking paper - if I had edible rice-paper, I'd be happy to use that, but mostly I just grease the trays VERY liberally.
Place the pine nuts in the bowl of a food processor and process until roughly chopped. I hand crush the flaked almonds, or just break up any pieces of chopped walnut that look too large. Transfer into a medium bowl, and stir in the caster sugar and 2 tbspns of the cocoa. Add the egg white and use a wooden spoon to mix well.
Drop 2 teaspoonsful of mixture onto the lined tray at a time, leaving about 2 cm between each. Place an extra pine nut in the centre of each. Combine the remaining cocoa and the icing sugar, and sift over the macaroons. I use the drinking chocolate to replace the combined icing sugar and cocoa. I drop the 2 teaspoonsful of mixture into a bowl of drinking chocolate and coat them generously, then place them on the trays, and decorate them with a flaked almond or a piece of walnut or whatever takes my fancy.
Bake in preheated oven for 25 minutes or until the macaroons spread and look cracked and dry. Remove from the oven and cool the macaroons on the trays. I leave them on the trays about one to two minutes, then transfer them to a cooling tray. If you try to remove them from the tray immediately, they'll crumble and fall apart. They'll still taste good, though. If you leave them 'til they're properly cold, they'll be stuck, and then they'll break into pieces when you try to lever them off the tray. They'll still taste good, though. If you used edible rice paper, you could safely leave them to go cold on the tray, as the recipe says. Then you eat the biscuit with the paper that's firmly stuck to it, and there's no problem. If you used ordinary baking paper, you'd start peeling the paper off the cold biscuits, but some bits would be stuck too hard, and when you decide to eat them anyway, those little wisps of paper that look insignificant on the bottom the bicuit, end up as chewy inedible wads of paper in your mouth. I don't like that, so I don't use baking paper.