CNY Piggy Macarons (Reduced-Sugar Swiss Method)

After giving the awesome Swiss method recipe that my friend Audrey shared a few tries, I am rather comfortable with it. I decided it's time to be a little adventurous and apply the same reduced-sugar method that I applied to both Italian and French methods to this Swiss method. Although I made many other macarons with this recipe, I thought of just presenting something festive, in time for Chinese New Year!

Only the piggies were made using the reduced-sugar method. The boy and girl macarons were made using regular Swiss method recipe, because I made them in preparation for my macaron class. The boy and girl macaron design can be found in my Creative Baking: Macaron Basics book.

I had some spare capacity to make a couple of macarons along with a cat macaron carousel, and so I decided to make the piggies.

Piped macaron batter. I didn't make enough peach coloured batter that's why the bottom shell looks like that 😅.

I decorated the macaron shells with edible marker, royal icing, peach coloured lustre dust and store-bought sugar flower.

I filled the macarons with whipped osmanthus white chocolate ganache

Take a look at how full the shells are!

I am really pleased that the reduced-sugar version works as well! As mentioned in my post for reduced-sugar Italian method, replacing icing sugar with rice flour makes the almond paste wetter as rice flour doesn't absorb as much moisture as icing sugar. So there is a need to reduce the amount of egg whites a little. I reduced the icing sugar and caster sugar portion by 10%. Feel free to double the recipe, use three-quarters of the recipe, or even combine the egg whites into one portion, used for making the Swiss meringue only. As mentioned in my original Swiss method post, some people find it easier to work with all the egg whites in the meringue and then folding in sifted dry ingredients into the meringue.

Reduced-sugar Swiss method
Ingredients (makes about 35-40 macarons):
Almond paste
100g superfine almond flour
90g icing sugar
8g rice flour
2g (1 tsp) cornflour
35g egg white

Swiss meringue
50g egg white
90g caster sugar
1/8 tsp cream of tartar (optional)
1/4 tsp salt (optional)

Steps:
Please refer to this post for the detailed steps. The only difference is if you are working with multiple colours in a single batch, the weight of meringue should be half the weight of almond paste for each colour of batter.

With love,
Phay Shing