Earl grey macaron – an experiment of flavour and colour

We came across this tea which has a very elegant fragrance and we decided to make some earl grey macaron. 

There’re many ways to add flavour into the macarons and the most common way is to infuse the flavour into the whipped cream used in the ganache, by putting the tea leaves in simmering cream.  We found this process didn’t yield the results we want to we tried another way – adding the tea leaves into the ganache.

Here comes the gadget we bought in the States. 

Yes, a marble mortar.  I know they’re also available in Canada but those are just not deep enough.  We bought this to make ground pistachios for the pistachio macarons.  A lot of the recipes tell you to use a coffee grinder or food processor to grind almond or other nuts but we found that will get the oil in the nuts out and make the thing too moist.  One of the solutions is to grind with powdered sugar but won’t work for macaron, which the balance of the ingredient is everything.   

And this is perfect if you just need to grind a little bit of tea leaves.  After grinding the tea leaves into a powder form, sift them to remove the bigger pieces.  We add the earl grey “powder” directly into the ganache.  Because they’re still tea leaves they won’t melt.  We got a blackish-coloured ganache just like those black sesame paste, which matched perfectly with the light purple macaron cookie. ^^