Chocolate Orange Macarons

Well this is very exciting! I’m so happy to finally show you the new and improved Afternoon Crumbs site. Yaaaay! My ridiculously talented friend Steve designed it for me and I’m more than a little bit in love with it. I hope you all are to. It has lots of new exciting features such as ‘Pin’ buttons, social links and my face. Oh yes. I’m really pleased to have this great new setting to share with you some exciting posts and I can’t wait to start this next part of my cake-filled journey. I couldn’t help but make a little something to celebrate my new look site. I felt I hadn’t made macarons in a while and really fancied some so set about making a few to mark the occasion. I wanted them to be orange to match my site colours so I made them chocolate orange flavour and filled them with a chocolate orange buttercream and orange jam centre. They are seriously good and taste like little jaffa cakes.

Chocolate Orange Macaron filling

 To fill approx. 25 macarons

 125g butter

 125g icing sugar

 2 tsp cocoa powder

 3 tbsp chocolate orange spread

 2 tsp milk

 sweet orange jam/marmalade

Beat the butter and icing sugar until pale and fluffy. Mix in the chocolate spread, cocoa powder and milk until smooth. Add a little more milk if the buttercream is still too stiff to pipe. Pipe a circle of buttercream on to one macaron shell and put a blob of orange jam in the middle. Sandwich with another macaron shell and put in the fridge to chill for a few hours or overnight.