25th December 2020

And so after much planning the big day is here.  I love Christmas - have I mentioned that yet? 

We started the day with smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels with a mimosa which was so lovely.

We also had roast beef with porcini butter, yorkies, roasties, brussels, fondant swede, glazed carrots and gravy.  It was absolutely delicious which was lovely, we were all laughing opening crackers playing games - just lovely.

I wanted dessert to be special so chose an Adriano Zumbo recipe which was a push but really tasted great.  Firstly I made a caramel and tonka bean panna cotta, I wanted it to taste like caramel which, when you are mixing with a lot of cream or milk, means you have to push the caramel to a slightly darker shade than if you were making, for instance, a caramel sauce.  

Part of the recipe was macaroons which turned out to be really painful.  I have made them once before but the recipe I used before did not use Italian meringue. I know that a true macaroon does use Italian meringue so I wanted to try.

The macaroons took me 3 attempts to get them perfect, it was really difficult but I did not want to give up.  I found that using my stand mixer did not work out so well, probably because of the small amount of egg yolks I was using.  Firstly the sugar caught on the whisk and so I lost maybe ¼ of the sugar although did have some beautiful spun sugar!  The mixture was a little too wet so they didn’t hold their shape as well as they could.  They were acceptable but not perfect.  

For my second attempt I followed tips I read in a macaroon book I have which said to drizzle the sugar syrup down the side of the bowl so it does not hit the whisk.  Unfortunately a fair amount of the sugar went straight down the side and then stayed on the very bottom.  

For my last attempt I decided to ditch the stand mixer and just use the electric hand held mixer I have.  So I whisked and Rhona poured in the sugar slowly.  I could see immediately how much better the meringue was, it looked billowy and soft.  When I mixed it with the almonds it looked perfect and as I piped, the shape held and I felt chuffed!  Persistence paid off!

I also had to figure out the best way to pipe and how much to pipe.  I started one way which was piping around the edge and ‘filling in’ but actually the best way was to hold the nozzle still and pipe out until I had the right amount.

I learnt a lot from this recipe and do like to push myself and try new things as it is the only way to get better.  This new element probably took up 3 or 4 hours in total but as I took my first bite I knew I had done it and I felt a huge sense of achievement.