Lemon and Chocolate macarons

The lemon one's right at the back!

So! It was my boyfriend's birthday this week and I made him an array of food for the occasion. We had blueberry pancakes for breakfast, lavender and honey pannacotta and blackberries for dessert and a coconut Genoese with lime French butter cream for the birthday cake (among some savoury eats, too!). I made Hugh F-W's sponge and substituted half the flour with whizzed up dessicated coconut, and brushed the cakes with coconut syrup. I made the French butter cream from this post, here, but used lime instead of lemon. It was pretty tasty! It didn't have quite as good a rise as a normal un-coconutty one, but it was slightly chewy and fragrant. This adventure landed me with some leftover egg whites. And leftover cream from the pannacotta...so ganache filled macaron attempt 3 it was!


I used the same recipe and method as my previous post (this one)but split the mixture in two. I flavoured one half with lemon zest and coloured it yellow, whilst the other was spiked with 40g of cocoa powder. Next time I would prefer to go really chocolatey by adding in melted chocolate and taking a little more time over the whole process. 
This time I didn't bother to leave them out for any specific length of time, aside from the ones that were waiting to get baked- and I don't think it made that much of a difference, if any.
I tried to make slightly smaller ones this time, which was a disaster on two accounts: 1, they didn't come out as smooth and uniforms as my last attempt and 2, I ate more.
They are filled with a ganache made by boiling cream and whisking in an equal amount of dark chocolate.

See! There's the lemon one!

ALSO! NB!!!! Handy hint to help next time: Only use the top shelf of the oven and bake one tray at a time. The first batch I did, I put two in at once. The middle shelf ones didn't cook properly, hence the lack of lemony goods (I also ate a lot of them).