#Chocollaboration Ep4: Le Mini Macaron
Macarons are adorable creations, delightful mouthfuls of crisp outer shell, and soft inner chewiness. And we have our own artisan Macaron maker here in the North East! It was an absolute privilege to invite Le Mini Macaron to join us for our #Chocollaboration this month. Many of you must have thought so too, as this session got booked up way in advance!
We heard from Gillian from Le Mini Macaron, as she shared how her and her daughter set up their business, realising that there was no where to buy these delights in the North East. We heard all about the learning curve they went on to develop their products, and the research about the different methods of making macarons.
Creative Collaborations
The challenges for this #Chocollaboration workshop were about flavour and aesthetic. The macarons bring colour and texture to the creation. However, the flavour of a macaron is not in the shell (apart from the lovely almond taste) - Le Mini Macaron add all their flavour to the fillings. So the challenge for the chocolatier here, is to create beautiful ganaches to fill the macarons with, experimenting with different flavour combinations. Popular choices included mango and white chocolate, and raspberry and dark chocolate - both of which are absolute classic winning flavours.
Davenport's Chocolates, Le Mini Macaron Chocollaboration guests with their creations.
For the next part of the workshop, guests were given the challenge of using the colour and vibrancy of the macarons to create a decorative 2D design on a chocolate slab. Jane demonstrated an example of using the circles of the macarons to represent scoops of ice-cream in a cone. Guests needed to create their own chocolate canvas 'slab' from tempered chocolate (milk or dark) and then build up a picture using piping techniques and combining any other ingredients from the chocolate kitchen to add to taste, texture or style. Several people used the ice cream cone as a starting point, often with more 'scoops' of ice-cream. Several others took their creative skills further to imagine other scenes which could feature these vibrant circles of macaron colour in other ways. We had a bicycle scene, a train carriage, sweets and some love-birds too. Its often hard to come up with an idea 'on the spot', so everybody did really well.
Of course, as always, lots of tasting was involved in the creative process - both in developing the ganache flavours, and enjoying the delicious macarons. Huge thanks to Gillian from Le Mini Macaron for joining us for the evening - you can find their Macarons at leminimacaron.co.uk, or at a food festival or market across the region. We wish them continued success in their fabulous business!
Future events and ticket availability can be seen here:
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We really hope this article has been helpful. We'd love to see pictures of your creations - so do post on social media and tag us on any relevant platforms. We can't always give specific help to individual queries, but if you have a comment or question that would help others, please leave it below. Thank you.
