Aquafaba Macarons

I love macarons. They’re beautiful, delicious, and lend themselves to all kinds of flavor combinations. Unfortunately they also take a bunch of egg whites, which I rarely have available without wasting yolks, and I hate waste. Which is why, after I made a chickpea dish the other night, I saved the chickpea brine to make something out of.

What do macarons have to do with chickpea brine, you ask? Everything. Because apparently (and this is something I only recently discovered, though it’s been a thing for a while) you can treat chickpea brine like egg white and it will whip up into a meringue! Amazing! You do have to reduce the brine by 50% first to get it to fluff up properly, but that part is easy.

I will note right now that to make the macarons with my aquafaba, I used my standard macaron recipe, which you can find here.

Anyway, I reduced my brine, chilled it, and it whipped up beautifully, making a perfect meringue.

It also made a lovely magma-like macaron batter.

That being said, when I followed the directions of several tutorials and baked my macarons at a very low temperature (250 degrees F) to avoid making the tops crack (apparently a danger with aquafaba macarons), the macarons themselves turned out rather flat. No feet!

I tried my last pan at my usual macaron temperature (350 for 2 minutes, then crack the oven door and bake for another 8-10 minutes) and they got feet, but they also rose unevenly and cracked, so I guess the correct temperature is something around 300.

I’ll have to try again at some point, but for now you can at least be assured that these will be smooth on top at the lower temperature.

Once they were baked and cooled, I sandwiched the shells with my latest chocolate fudge frosting and a dollop of Nutella, then let my daughter roll the sides in sprinkles and paint the tops with food coloring.

Okay, I admit that I kept a few to paint myself so they’d be extra-pretty, but I always do that when I have little helpers in the kitchen! The results were delicious– just like normal macarons!– so I will definitely be trying these again the next time I make something with chickpeas in it!

Mexican Wedding “Hosts”

If you’re confused by the title (and are not averse to a little blasphemy), I encourage you to go read this and then come back. I came across it a few weeks ago and laughed until I cried. And then I promptly decided that I needed to make some of my own in time for Easter.

Not a full bread sculpture (though I’m not ruling that out for some time in the future), but Mexican wedding cookies, complete with rainbow sprinkles. They sounded pretty good, actually.

I’ve made Mexican wedding cookies before– with sprinkles, even– when I made those adorable Hedgehog Cookies. They were tender and delicious, and I knew they’d make the perfect base for these. Really, I didn’t do much to alter the recipe, except add rainbow sprinkles both inside and out. I did leave a few of the cookies plain on the outside so I could roll them in powdered sugar, per tradition. I think I liked those best of all, and they’re not quite as garish as the sprinkle-bedecked cookies so beloved by my kindergartener.

Ice Cream Cone Cake Pops

I’ve had these in the back of my head for ages, and while they didn’t turn out precisely as planned, they did look adorable and taste fantastic, so I’m counting them as a win!

It all started when I saw the boxes of miniature ice cream cones at the grocery store… in Canada. I’d been unable to find the mini cones anywhere near me in the US, but when I saw them on the shelf I recklessly sacrificed suitcase space and picked up three boxes. Totally worth it.

Then they languished in my cabinets for a few months until I had the opportunity to use them. But the opportunity did arise, first at my annual ice cream social, and then when my daughter was invited to a birthday party this summer. Out came the boxes of cones, out came my bag-ful of frozen cake scraps, and I was all set!

Honey Cornflake Crunchies

Taking a break from sewing for a while, here’s something sweet!

After I made my Faux Fried Ice Cream Cake I had a decent amount of extra cornflake topping, which I regularly used to make “fried ice cream” on its own by topping vanilla ice cream with the cornflakes and a drizzle of honey. I kept the extra topping in a ziploc bag in the freezer, and when I ran out of vanilla ice cream I just started crunching it by the handful for a treat. Something about the crunchy, buttery, sweet mouthful made it supremely snackable, and I wanted to figure out a format I could use to make an easier-to-eat version.

Imagine my joy when I came across multiple recipes for honey cornflake cookies, which basically sounded like the perfect way to interpret this flavor/texture combination. They couldn’t be easier– only a few ingredients and minimal preparation. I even let my preschooler do the majority of the work, and she loved it! (now, if only I can teach her how to temper chocolate)

These turned out cute, crunchy, and reasonably good. Not “oh my god make these right now” good, but if you’re looking for something simple to make with your kids that won’t overload them with sugar or fat, these would work. Bonus– nut free, egg-free, and they’re made of cereal so you can bill them as “healthy treats” if you bring them to school for a party or something.

Hedgehog Cookies

So remember that office ice cream party I mentioned, where I took home a ton of rainbow sprinkles? Well, there were also chocolate sprinkles. And chopped walnuts. And rather than let perfectly good toppings go to waste, I decided to make something else out of them. I was trying to figure out what I could possibly do with brown, only vaguely chocolate-tasting sprinkles, when it struck me that brown sprinkles looked kind of like hedgehog fur. And an idea was born…

Strawberry Sprinkle Squares!

So as part of a summer celebration my office held an ice cream party– Ben & Jerry’s dropped off several quarts of ice cream, with a bunch of different toppings in more quart containers… more toppings than anyone could reasonably expect to use. The question is, what to do with the leftover ice cream and sprinkles, especially when the ice cream has melted during the course of the party and re-frozen into an icy, un-scoopable block?

That’s where I come in. After a fruitless few minutes trying to chisel off a chunk of strawberry ice cream for my own consumption (sadly, the plastic spoons provided were not up to the task), I got permission to take things home and transform them into something the office could enjoy. What did I get? Over a pint of strawberry ice cream, plus almost another full quart of rainbow sprinkles… What to do?

Cake, of course.