'Miffy with Rainbow Scarf' Blackforest Macarons

My friend requested for a few Miffy macaron cake toppers for her daughter's birthday as the celebrations span over a couple of weeks. I made Miffys with rainbow scarves as requested :)

The round macs with little Miffy heads were made with extra batter.

I usually prefer the Italian method for making character macarons as it is easier to adjust the colouring. But because this batch is so small, I decided to use French method. The recipe is a little different from what I normally use as I would like to keep the white colour on the shell whiter without adding too much white colouring. I replaced 20% of almond with rice flour and a bit of cornflour. You may replace the rice flour with almond in the recipe below if you find it too troublesome to include another ingredient.

You may refer to my video tutorial for the basics of French method over here.

Recipe for Miffy macaron shells
Ingredients (makes about 12 macarons):
Powdered ingredients
40g superfine almond flour
10g rice flour
1/8 tsp cornflour
1/8 tsp salt
50g icing sugar

Food colouring
1/8 white powder food colouring
Orange gel food colouring

Meringue
40g egg whites
36g castor sugar
1/8 tsp cream of tartar (optional)

Steps:
1. Sift together all powdered ingredients. Divide into two equal portions. Add white powder into one portion.

2. In a clean metal bowl, beat egg whites with cream of tartar until stiff peaks form, gradually adding sugar. Divide into two equal portions. Add orange food colouring to one portion.

3. Add half of sifted ingredients into meringue for the respective colours. And gently fold in. Add the second half of the powdered ingredients and gently fold until combined. Deflate the batter with spatula against sides of bowl until consistency is like lava (please see video tutorial).

4. Transfer both coloured batter into piping bags fitted with a Wilton #7 round tip. Pipe the Miffys!

5. Bang the tray on the table to release trapped air. I piped the parts in stages to create some definition between boundaries. Dry in air-con room or under a fan until surface is dry to touch.

6. Towards end of drying time, preheat oven to 150℃ and set the rack to lowest position. Bake 7 min and reduce temperature to 110℃. The oven temperature will gradually fall. Bake for another 15-20 minutes or until feet doesn't appear wet. Cool completely on tray before peeling parchment paper away from macaron shells.

I drew the eyes and mouth with black edible marker and iced the rainbow scarf with royal icing.

All decorated!

I made my own cherry jam. You may refer to this post for the recipe but blend the pitted cherries before cooking the jam as this is for macaron filling, unless you prefer chunky cherry pieces in your macarons

Jam in piping bag, ready to fill!

I made a rather firm dark chocolate ganache as the full body Miffys are supposed to be cake toppers. You don't want the macaron shells to start sliding halfway through display. You may refer to this recipe for the dark chocolate ganache but reduce the amount of cream to 25g.

Filling the Miffys!

You may include some stabilized whipped dairy cream into the filling to make it truly a blackforest macaron. It will definitely be really delicious! I was making the Miffys mainly as cake toppers so I had to make sure that overall the filling is still firm enough so I didn't include the cream.

As it was, these were really well received in looks and taste according to my friend :).

Stay tuned for my next blog post with one of the Miffys on top of a coconut sweet potato rainbow chiffon sponge and pudding cake!

With love,
Phay Shing