peanut butter and jelly macarons

Fancy French pastry meets America’s favorite sandwich in these peanut butter and jelly macarons!

Trashing up macarons with America’s most cherished childhood sandwich has to be all kinds of illegal.

It’s a good thing I’m dead set on The.Boy and I going to Italy for our honeymoon, because after these?

I’m pretty sure France has put out some kind of emergency warrant for my arrest.

Not only are my macs slightly hollow on the insides, somewhat cracked and deformed on the outsides, with feet that wax and wane with each 90 degree turn of the cookie.

(All of which might have been forgivable, and chalked up to me being a “silly American”.)

But I PB&J-ED THEM.

And WHAT do I have to say for myself?

#sorrynotsorry

I stand by that.

So maybe these are not the most fairytale-perfect macs on the planet, but they are dang delicious.

Even more so because you don’t know what to expect until you bite into them. You can tell right off the bat that they have a peanut butter center, but it’s the grape jelly surprise inside that appeals to your inner child and insists that you come back for one more bite or one more macaron.

As I hinted in yesterday’s post, the fabulous folks over at Sucre have challenged me to make the perfect mac! They supplied me with their secret recipe (adapted for a home kitchen) as well as some of their macs for me to use as a point of comparison. I couldn’t wait for those to arrive to dive into some macaron-ing, however.

The Sucre recipe is very no-frills/low-stress, but I think there are some adaptations I’m going to need to make if I really want to make the perfect mac. So let’s just call these a work in progress and I promise I’ll be back before the end of the month with a few more attempts, and maybe even a perfect no-fail recipe or two. We shall see.

The best thing about macs is that even the most imperfect of the bunch still tastes AMAZING, so don’t let their finicky reputation get in the way of you giving these a try!

(But, if you want to start out slow and not excommunicate yourself from the land of love, croissants, and pommes frites, I totally understand. I still maintain  – #sorrynotsorry.)

Peanut Butter and Jelly Macarons

 

Fancy French pastry meets America's favorite sandwich in these peanut butter and jelly macarons!

Yield: 24 macarons

Ingredients

• 1 cup (125 g) almond flour
• 1 cup (125 g) confectioner's sugar
• ½ cup (100 g) + 1¾ tbsp (25 g) granulated sugar, divided
• ½ cup (100 g) egg whites
• purple food coloring gel
• 1 cup peanut butter
• ½ cup grape jelly

Instructions

1. Sift together the almond flour, confectioner's sugar, and ½ cup granulated sugar. Set aside.
2. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, beat the egg whites and 1¾ tbsp sugar together until stiff peaks form. Mix in the purple food gel, enough so that desired color is reached.
3. Fold the dry ingredients into the egg white mixture, about 45 strokes, smearing the batter against the sides to deflate the egg whites, until the batter falls like lava from the spatula and re-incorporates into itself after about 20 seconds.
4. Put the batter in a piping bag and pipe into 1½-inch circles on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Rap the pans hard against a counter a few times to dislodge any air bubbles.
5. Let sit for 30-60 minutes until a skin forms on the macarons. Meanwhile, heat oven to 300. Bake for 15 minutes. Let cool completely on the pans, and then turn them over.
6. Pipe peanut butter around the edges of half of the cool macarons. Fill the center of this circle with grape jelly. Sandwich together with an un-filled macaron.

source:https://joanne-eatswellwithothers.com/2014/04/peanut-butter-jelly-macarons.html