As Sakura season is here, I am inspired by the Hanami dango, which is a traditional Japanese confectionery that announces the arrival of spring. Of course I couldn't resist the chance to make it kawaii with Hello Kitty, My Melody and Keroppi!
Matcha, strawberry and vanilla white chocolate ganache as filling to match the traditional colours
Besides vegan macarons with vegan fillings, I took the chance to try out vegan royal icing for some of the fine details.
All credit goes to Meiyee (Instagram account: nm_meiyee) for sharing her vegan recipes. Her work is beautiful, naturally coloured and flavoured! I adapted from her recipes that are shared so I didn't follow exactly what she did but do check out her account for the recipes and to marvel at her work!
I used bakeable matcha powder with no additional artificial green colouring for the matcha shells and ganache. I added freeze-dried strawberry powder and a tiny bit of bottled strawberry emulsion for strawberry. I used matcha Pocky sticks for the "skewer" (I know it's not vegan but I prefer having everything edible but I didn't want to make the biscuit sticks from scratch too ๐)
Here are some photos of the process:
Freshly baked shells. I was working on a separate set for future vegan macaron class material at the same time.
I actually rushed through the decoration and didn't manage to finish as I had to go out of the house. This is the works-in-progress decoration with vegan royal icing. Could have been better if I didn't rush
Strawberry, matcha and vanilla vegan white chocolate ganache before whipping it up to lighten the texture.
Filling up the macarons and inserting a matcha Pocky stick
Experienced macaron bakers will be able to tell that I had issues with one of the colours of batter and they would be right! I knew what went wrong and but am confident I can rectify it for the class. After all, this is my first attempt and it was rather ambitious of me to try three colours/flavours of macaron shells in a single batch. The flavour that I left to the last to work on had issues because the meringue needed to be whipped stiffer again and I should have trusted my instincts to do so. Can you tell which one it is?
I am excited to be able to include vegan macarons as part of my class content after this experiment. Stay tuned for class announcements July onwards for vegan macarons! But note that I won't be teaching the Sanrio characters.
Check out my Instagram reel for some video snippets of the aquafaba meringue and macaron batter!
with love,
Phay Shing
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