Se7en Make Macaroons and visit Cassis Paris….

The Father person and I have a hunkering to take the kids to Paris, really we need to see the Tour De France Live… a wild and insane dream!!! And then Sycamore Stirrings posted about Macaroon tasting in Paris… and we had yet another reason to take the trip!!! Well last month when we were doing the monthly shop and trust me I need a reward BEFOREHAND to get through this, we noticed a new store in the mall… A little French Store… called Cassis Paris… full of bites of delight… little bits of everything, but I was a bit shy to whip out my camera and photograph these trays of hmmmm sweet sweet treats!!! You will have to visit the website and see for yourself…

Anyway we rushed home and made an apple pie…

But actually, what we were after were macaroons… only they would do!!! And we did a recipe hunt and they ALL use almond flour in them, gasp… nut allergy alert… we have a nut free home and so Hood #3 and I set out to make some nut free macaroons… pretty easy really, we just replaced the almond flour with regular cake flour and next time we will use self raising flour because crisp and light and melt in your mouth is what you are after.

I know the whole of France is throwing up their arms in despair – but a nut allergy is a nut allergy and we are moving on.

Let’s Meet The Players:

For the cookies:

• 2 egg whites.
• 1 cup of flour.
• 1 cup of caster sugar for the meringue.
• 1/2 a cup of castor sugar for the flour.
• A pinch of salt.

For the butter cream filling:

• 2 tablespoons of melted butter.
• 2 tablespoons of milk.
• a capful of vanilla essence.
• a capful of icing sugar.

Let’s Play the Game:

1. Sift the flour and half a cup of caster sugar into a mixing bowl, we never sift (!), we gently place!!!



2. Beat the egg whites and the salt until they are stiffening.



3. Then add the caster sugar very slowly and beat away like crazy… and if you do it for long enough you will have a nice smooth meringue. (If it is still crunchy then beat it a bit longer).



4. Add your meringue mixture to the flour mixture and gently fold it in.



5. We carefully rolled our cookies into balls of meringue cookies.
6. And baked them in a low oven for about an hour.



7. And there you go: yummy crispy meringue cookies.

And the se7en + 1th thing:


8. To make the butter cream: Add all the ingredients together and beat. We popped ours in the fridge for a few minutes to stiffen slightly. Then sandwich some butter cream between two cookies an you are done.

And then at the last minute we needed to try some chocolate ones too. So we added some cocoa to the mixture – we should have added it to the flour and sugar before we add the meringue, but it was a bit of an after thought.

And they turned out just tasty!!!

We added some melted 85% chocolate to the butter cream…

And we were done!!!

And we will definitely be making these again!!!

Back to Cassis Paris… This is what we bought… Yes it comes in its own little box!!!

And after much pondering and debate this was the delightful morsel that we chose…

Thankfully Paris has come to us!!!