Kermit turds

I was convinced that this batch was going to bomb – I had my doubts about the recipe, had my doubts about the food colouring (although this bottle only expired in 2009. I’m pretty sure there’s some pre-millennium food colouring in the house somewhere. I’m going to save that for when Farf visits. It’s vintage.), had paid too much for the ingredients, and had too much riding on them. I even made a spare dessert just in case, but, by God, they worked. They actually worked. They looked like the results of Kermit the Frog’s digestion process, but they were gooooood.

Mmm. Small puddles of Kermit vomit.

One of the above statements may give a clue as to the recipe: pistachio macaroons are expensive as hell. Working out the price per macaroon yesterday, I think I came up with 40 or 50p each, which isn’t cheap. These may actually be cheaper to buy. That said, they were delectable.

I was initially unconvinced by Nigella’s recipe – if you look at the picture in How to be a Domestic Goddess, the macaroons are all cracked and don’t have any feet. Actually, they look more like Italian macaroons... – is Nigella’s:

75g pistachio nuts                                                                          

125g icing sugar

2 large egg whites

15g caster sugar

Oven at 180 C for 10-12 minutes

You grind the pistachios and icing sugar together in the food processor (which, as with the raspberry macaroons, I think is probably the crucial step) before folding that mixture into the stiff egg whites. Then pipe (or spoon) them out, leave for 15 minutes (NO NO NIGELLA – LONGER!) and bake for about 10 minutes.

Because I was paranoid, I employed some additional tricks :

I added a teaspoon of cream of tartar (rather than baking powder, as I’ve used in previous recipes. This seemed to work better – cream of tartar is, along with baking soda, one of the two constituent ingredients of baking powder. I think cream of tartar is the acid and soda is the alkaline, which together, make bubbles and help your creation to rise). The reason this worked better may have been that the tartar stabilises the egg whites, rather than making them rise, which is what the baking soda would do.

With the raspberry macaroons I seemed to have success with whipping the egg whites in an aluminium saucepan rather than a plastic bowl (which can retain tiny particles of fat and stop the whites from getting stiff). This time I went even further and ran a cut lemon around the inside of the saucepan (cast iron this time) and dried it to make doubly sure to get rid of any grease. These macaroons turned out a little less flat than the raspberry macaroons, so I think it may have helped.

Finally, I tapped the baking sheet to eliminate any air bubbles (which didn’t completely work – the finished macaroons had some tiny bubbles in, but they did have a proper carapace though, so I’m pretty happy) and of course, let them to sit for a LOT longer than Nigella recommends – about an hour. As you can see, these weren’t so much Kermit turds as liquidised paté de Kermit.

Voilà! I was both incredibly relieved (we were having people over for dinner) and quite pleased with the result. As with the raspberry macaroons, unfortunately they took on quite a brown tinge in the oven. I tried to compensate for the ridiculous heat of our fan oven by placing a baking sheet on the top rack, but it didn’t seem to make much of a difference, unfortunately. The brown suggests a slightly faecal air (eeew. faecal air.).

Darby O'Gill and the little macaroons

They’re sandwiched together with a pistachio buttercream (not actually guacamole, although I’d made some of that too, and they were indistinguishable to my father, who loaded some pistachio buttercream onto a tortilla chip. New taste sensation.), which shoud be half fat to icing sugar, with a quarter pistachios, but I didn’t have enough icing sugar, so shoved some caster sugar in too. The result wasn’t bad exactly, but they did have a peculiarly sandy texture, that made me feel like I must be eating them at the beach...

All in all, very pleasing (strangely spreading feet and some cracked tops notwithstanding. No idea how to fix), and as it was St Patrick’s Day, I couldn’t resist the urge to strew shamrocks on the plate. How Hollywood. How embarrassing. To make up for my shame, I take the Kermit (rainbow?) connection one step further and offer you some of his friends singing a nice Irish song, one day late...