An Orange for Frankie

The Mac Attack challenge is time was to make a macaron with our favorite childhood book as inspiration.
While this book wasn't written when I was a child, I love it as an adult.  I used this book as my inspiration for Chocolate Marmalade Macarons.

An Orange for Frankie, the children's picture book written by Patricia Polacco, is another beautiful book by this wonderful writer and illustrator.

 This book tells the true story of the author's great uncle, who lived during the Great depression of the 1930's in America. Every Christmas his father made the long journey into the city to bring home one precious orange for each family member which sat on the fireplace mantel until it was peeled and eaten after Christmas Eve supper.



 
Frankie puts his orange in his pocket and accidentally loses it and he is devastated.  After dinner his family presents him with an orange - eight wedges held together with a ribbon. Each family member had cut a wedge from their precious orange and put them together for Frankie.  They told him that his orange was like their family, held together by the ribbon, which represented love.  What a beautiful and endearing story.

When I frist read this book it was eery.  You see we have a family tradition of putting chocolate oranges in our daughters Christmas stockings; wedged chocolate oranges.
There is a company here is the United States that makes a milk or dark chocolate foil-wrapped orange, sold mostly during the Christmas season.  The chocolate isn't exceptional but the draw is that when they are whacked sharply on something hard they cleanly break off into chocolate orange segments.  Pretty clever, huh?  My girls loved to get both a real orange and a chocolate one on Christmas morning.  Thinking that they were getting older and this was a childish tradition, I didn't put the chocolate oranges in their stockings two years ago, silly me!  You would have thought that the GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS!  Two of them complained that just because they are growing older it didn't mean that traditions shouldn't still be carried on, so I made sure that I bought the chocolate oranges early last year for their stockings. 

My first attempt at chocolate macarons ended in the first failure that I have ever had making

macarons.  The chocolate recipe from this book seemed "off" from the beginning.  Even though I weighed the ingredients, the batter was so sticky and wet it never formed the skin on the top of the mac.   After hours of letting the macs sit on my counter to dry without any skin forming at all, I baked them anyway.

The first macs are at the top of the photo, and just as I suspected; they didn't get feet. They are not very pretty or appetizing looking, but the nutella caramel buttercream filling we put inside was delicious.  Rachel took them to a party with her London roomates and they ate all of them, so they were eaten and they tasted good but they didn't look good.   I wouldn't recommend the book this recipe came from.  Enough of that recipe. 

My friend Barbara (of Barbara Bakes ) told me her favorite chocolate macaron recipe was David Lebovitz'.  So I made new batch using his recipe and had much better results.  As you can see from the photo, this recipe has a lot of cocoa powder.  These macs have a pronounced chocolate flavor and just look at those pretty feet.  

Same technique and humidity on the same day.  Better recipe.  Enough said. 

I sandwiched some butter cream made with my homemade orange marmalade (love this stuff), which I have posted about before; and voila!  Crunchy outside, chewy inside, with just the right amount of orange flavor.

This recipe is a "keeper".  Beautiful chocolate macarons, finally!