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 …
I’m tired of everyone telling me to not eat sugar. What is that. It’s all over the newspaper and magazines. Ugh. As long as I’m consuming less than I did over Christmas it’s ok right? They can drop it now. I’m not interested. I am however, majorly interested and excited about these macarons. Plus I’m sure one or two of these won’t do any harm. It’s been a good while since I’ve made macarons (you can see my previous attempts here) and I’ve kind of missed making them. Sure, they can be temperamental and messy, but, the results are always …
So it was summer for like 5 seconds. Over last weekend’s bank holiday there was actual sun and it was warm. I wasn’t aware that this country was capable of warm anymore so it was a pleasant surprise, and perfect timing too. I mentioned we went to a birthday picnic but after that we went to a BBQ. This BBQ was amazing for many reasons, but one being the Pimms that was served. It was stuffed full of fruit and having not had it in so so long, it tasted even better. Although this weekend we didn’t have a repeat forecast (It rained and I got drenched. Boo) my friend Fiona came to stay and we decided to make macarons and immediately I knew what flavour to make. Pimms has such a great flavour and it’s one of those drinks that doesn’t taste like you’re drinking any alcohol (Dangerous. In a good way.) and reminds me so much of summer and tennis and our garden. For these macarons I began by making the shells using this recipe and had a tough time getting the pimms colour; they ended up a bit pink but I now I know for next time. For the fiilling I made a buttercream, flavoured with neat Pimms and mixed in strawberries, cucumber and mint. When assembling them I added in a large piece of strawberry in the centre which I might not do next time as it made the macarons go softer the next day and ooze strawberry goo. But boy did they taste like Pimms, especially when they were still a little chilled from the fridge. These definitely distracted me from the lack of sunshine and made it feel like summer again for 5 seconds.
My sister has become pretty obsessed with my macarons. She even requested some for her company, Found‘s quarterly review. I still think it’s pretty amazing that my sister works for a company whose colour is purple. It’s her favourite. So deciding what colour the macarons had to be was easy, but I wasn’t sure what flavour to make them. Most purple macarons I’ve seen are …
