Ginger snowmen macarons

Although I make macarons frequently, it is a first for me to do a macaron shape that is anything other than circular, so having seen meringue versions of snowmen in a shop recently I felt I had to make some as macarons….well, why not?!

ginger macaron snowmen

While I used to think life is too short to be decorating macarons in particularly fine detail (other than a quick drizzle of melted chocolate over them, perhaps), I felt I had to at least give it a go.

macaron snowmen piped out and left “to rest” for about an hour

Making the macaron mixture

If you have never made macarons before, or have made them but have had mixed results, please do have a look at my main macarons post, in which I have given full notes, top tips, troubleshooting advice, flavour ideas and the like.

ginger macaron snowmen

Shaping

The snowman shape is easy: at the piping stage, you pipe one circle as normal and then a smaller circle just above, so that they meet and blend together at the join.

Suggest proportions for the ingredients

For these snowmen macarons I used the basic macaron recipe on the above macaron post, using 100g of egg whites. This gave me 18 filled snowmen (36 snowmen shells).

So the macaron shells here were:

• 100g egg whites
• 100g caster sugar
• 125g ground almonds
• 125g icing sugar

See “Top Tip 1: regarding the weights of each ingredient” on my macaron making post for the amount of the other ingredients for whatever amount of egg white you have. It really is much easier weighing out the whole egg whites first eg: using the whites from 3 eggs, and then measuring the other ingredients based on this.

Flavour, flavour, flavour!

I wanted flavour to come through in these, rather than just being plain macarons, so I used 1 teaspoon of ground ginger to the macaron mixture (mixed with the icing sugar and ground almonds). I decided not to add any colouring.

The macaron shells were filled with a stem ginger ganache: in the ganache recipe at the above macaron recipe link, omit the raspberry and instead add two pieces of either pureed or finely chopped stem ginger, plus 2 tablespoons of the stem ginger syrup to the mixture. If you feel the ganache is not setting enough, mix in a little more melted white chocolate.

ready to fill and decorate

Decorations:

These were very quick to do, taking about 30 minutes to decorate the whole batch. And of course you only need to decorate half of the macaron shells.

ginger macaron snowmen

I had some marzipan that I kneaded with a little orange zest and puréed stem ginger: just a little is needed otherwise the marzipan becomes too wet to work with. This marzipan was then used for the noses and the scarves.

• eyes, button and mouth: melted white chocololate, coloured black and piped onto the macaron shells in dots
• nose: the above marzipan, coloured orange. Take a small piece, roll out with your fingers on the work surface that has been lightly dusted with icing sugar to give a long, very thin cylinder of marzipan. Cut off small pieces and gently roll the ends to taper it. Leave at room temperature to firm up. Stick to the macaron using a little drop of melted chocolate.
• scarf: the above marzipan, coloured red. Roll out as for the nose and cut into pieces a bit longer than the neck of the snowmen. Flatten gently and leave at room temperature to firm up. Once the macarons have been filled and stuck together, use a few drops of melted chocolate along the neck of the tops of each snowmen and place the scarves on.

ginger macaron snowmen

Author: Philip

Finalist on Britain’s Best Home Cook (BBC Television 2018). Published recipe writer with a love of growing fruit & veg, cooking, teaching and eating good food. View all posts by Philip