A friend and I are thinking about running a food stall at one of London’s weekend markets. Neither of us have experience in professional catering but we’re both huge foodies and like a bit of a challenge! We had our first trial session last week and tested three new recipes. I’ve decided to post the sweet treat first as I’ve been leaning towards savoury the last few days. Change is good.
This recipe comes from Dan Lepard and was featured in a December 2011 issue of The Guardian (I nearly always find an amazing new recipe in their weekend colour supplements). Like cupcakes, macaroons seem to be a bit of a trend in London at the moment. Last October a friend bought me a ticket to the Experimental Food Society’s Exhibition at The Truman Brewery. There they had a hand painted tree covering an entire wall bearing macaroons in all sorts of colours. It was a beautiful display and certainly caught lots of people’s attention. The Great British Bake off also did a series where home bakers were challenged to make these light baked confections. A work colleague raved about it, consequently I had macaroons on the brain for several days and by coincidence I stumbled across Lepard’s old-style macaroon recipe.
With very few ingredients these are incredibly easy to make. It’s unfortunate that the centres don’t remain a vibrant beetroot colour ( as you can see from the photo above it’s pretty spectacular) but in many ways I prefer that because you get two very beautiful tones; a rose pink shell with a peach centre. My photo below doesn’t do them any justice because the lighting was wrong on my iphone but nevertheless these were a delight to make and hopefully next time round we can try and experiment with other natural food colourings avoiding using any E numbers.
