Random 12 - Caramel Butter Cream

Took a week off from making macarons - didn't buy any eggs & seperate them early enough in the week.  But did seperate some last week, so today was Macaron day again!

This weeks recipe is Pierre Hermes for Caramel Macarons - of course, I didn't have the liquid coffee extract he suggested, so I used a 1 teaspoon of instant coffee in 15g of hot water.  I'm assuming the very weak coffee flavor is because the coffee extract is much stronger, so instead of a coffee flavored shell, these are more Cafe au Lait (which sounds fancier, but some coffee with a lot of milk, so not very strong, just like the coffee flavor I got).

So - how did the 3rd batch go?  Should be best ones yet, right?  Ummm - no.

1) Batter - what I thought was nice & light turned out to be too wet.  When I piped them out, making them a little bit bigger this time, they then settled more, and about 1/3rd of them clumped together so much as to be unuseable (besides not getting nice, individual shells, they cook different in clumps, and got huge air pockets and undercooked in the center ones).

2) Caramel - it's tasty, and sweet. But boy - when they say butter cream, I know why butter is the first word.  I don't think most people will notice, if they only eat one. It's light and fluffy enough, but wow that's a lot of butter.  And the caramel managed to boil over - I grabbed it off the burner at the last possible chance to avert a huge mess, resulting in a smaller mess on the stove top, and a small burn on 1 finger.

3) On the good side, I had done some research and found out it takes a while for the sugar syrup to reach 115c, so relax and wait for it.  Needed to do same thing later on with the caramel, after adding in the butter (which took forever to incorporate with a wooden spoon - next time I'm breaking out the whisk earlier), and then the heavy cream - even that took a while to boil up to 108c.

So - it's a good batch - maybe a 6 or 7.  Shells are too light in general with big air pockets, and filling is very sweet and buttery.  Don't think I'll make this one often. Next batch, I think, will be left-overs.  Probably 2/3rds Blackberry Confiture (from #11, frozen for a rainy day), and maybe 1/3 Caramel (if there's not enough Blackberry).  Maybe not a bad idea as it'll give me time to focus on the shells with the filling(s) already done.