Coffee or Tea?

Hot or iced?

Sweet or unsweet?

Being a professional barista, I ask these questions all the time. Sometimes it's hard to decide. I love it all: Hot, iced, sweet, unsweet, frozen, on the rocks, coffee or tea. But now I have a new question I can ask...

Dessert or Snack?

 

Hazelnut Mocha or Tea with Honey?

Mmm... Nutella. You know that fantastically addictive chocolate hazelnut spread? Pair that with a crispy, chewy coffee flavored macaron cookie... Pure delight.

But who doesn't like tea with honey? These used a combination of lapsang souchong (a smoked black tea) and breakfast tea. Filled with a sweet, custard-like honey buttercream, these macarons are dangerously delicious.

Buttercream 101

Before I get too far into these macarons, let's take a moment and learn about buttercream. 

When I first came across this recipe for honey buttercream, I had to research if it was possible. I had never heard of cooking egg yolks and then beating in butter. I quickly learned there are five types of buttercream: 

     American - a combination of powdered sugar, butter, sometimes shortening and flavor

     Swiss - egg whites and sugar that are heated in a double boiler to 140-160 F, then whipped into a meringue before adding butter

     Italian - sugar syrup heated to the soft ball stage and then drizzled into whipped egg whites before adding butter

     French - made the same way as Italian, except using egg yolks instead of whites 

     German (Bavarian) - egg yolks and sugar cooked until thickened, allowed to cool and then beaten with butter.

American buttercream is by far the sweetest of these. I've never tried a French buttercream, but the German is extremely rich, creamy and super spreadable. I still love my Swiss Meringue, but I might have found a new filling favorite. 

I've come across recipes for instant pudding in frosting, but I want to try a cook and serve pudding mix as a base to German buttercream. I'm going to apply my scientific method and research this. I'll let y'all know how it works out. 

Now back to macarons... 

I easily modified my macaron recipe for the Hazelnut Mocha Macarons by adding 2 tablespoons of instant coffee powder to the almond/powdered sugar mix. I piped them into 1 inch cookies and filled with a simple smear of Nutella.

For the Tea-n-Honey Macarons, I added the tea from three single cup servings of tea to the almond mix. I followed this recipe without any adaptions for the honey buttercream. 

I made the coffee macarons first and decided that the tea macarons needed to be a bit larger. These are roughly 1 1/2 to 2 inches across. (I really didn't measure and they've all been gobbled up by now) The macaron batter made exactly 30 cookies (that's 15 sandwiches). I was able to generously fill all the cookies and only had about a quarter cup of honey buttercream left over. 

So get out there and caffeinate your dessert. Or snack. Really it just depends on when you attack these babies...

 here's to choices!

bleu