Like many people, I’ve recently finished rewatching the entire Avatar series on Netflix! It was so nostalgic because the last time I had seen the show was over 10 years ago and it was still as good as I had last remembered it! I’ve seen a lot of bakes inspired by characters from this show and wanted to try my hand at paying an homage to the show by making some Appa shaped hojicha macarons 🙂
This was actually my first venture into making macarons with designs on them and I’m really proud of how they came out, so I wanted to share the recipe with everyone! I didn’t have any food coloring on hand so the coloring is actually all natural, each bit is colored with a bit of cocoa powder, hojicha powder, and black sesame seeds.
These macarons also use the hojicha milk spread, that I had made previously, for the filling, giving these classic French pastries a nice Asian twist.
Ingredients
Macarons
- 3 large egg whites
- 1 1/2 cup almond flour
- 1/3 cup granulated sugar
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- black sesame seeds (for decoration)
Hojicha Milk Spread (filling)
- recipe can be found here
Instructions
Macarons
- Sift together the almond flour and powdered sugar into a bowl
- Add the egg whites to a clean bowl (this is really important because if there's even a drop of oil in it the egg whites won't whip up properly!)
- Use an electric mixer to whip up the egg whites until they form stiff peaks, gradually pouring in the granulated sugar into the egg whites as you're whipping them up
- Once stiff peaks have formed, carefully fold in 1/3 of the dry ingredients with a silicone spatula, turning the bowl as you fold it in
- Continue doing this with the rest of the dry ingredients until the mixture is combined (you don't want the batter to be too runny or the macarons won't bake properly so DO NOT overmix, you'll want to stop when the ingredients have just combined and the batter feels thick and is able to fall into a figure 8 pattern from your spatula, without breaking)
- Take 1/3 cup of the batter and put it into a small bowl and take another 1/3 of the batter and put it into another bowl
- Mix in a teaspoon of cocoa powder into one bowl and a teaspoon of hojicha powder into the other
- Once the batters are done, fill plastic bags with each and pipe a ~1 inch circle of the white batter onto a pan lined with parchment paper
- Once all the rounds have been piped out, bang the baking pan on your countertop a couple times to remove any air bubbles from the batter
- Wait 10 minutes for these round to set before piping on the decorations with the colored batters and then pipe to make them look like Appa!
- NOTE: you'll want some plain, undecorated round ones to be the bottom half of your macaron sandwich (these should be the same size as the tops!)
- Leave the piped macarons out to rest for about and hour or until the tops have firmed and you're able to touch the tops without any batter sticking to your finger
- Preheat the oven to 300F and baked the macarons for 14 minutes, rotating the tray every 7 minutes
Assembly
- Allow the macarons to cool completely in the pan before removing
- Take a dollop of the hojicha milk spread and fill the macarons with them, then enjoy!
- If there's any leftovers its fine to leave them in an airtight container in the fridge for 1-3 days. If you like them a bit firm you can eat them straight from the fridge, or leave them out on the counter for 30 minutes to reach room temperature before eating!
