Bananaramacarons

Due to a recent, not yet blogged about, food event we discovered that you can actually grind banana chips and use them in cooking. As so often happens to us of late, we started wondering if there might be a way to use this knowledge to pervert macarons, and it turns out there is! This one, like the snickerons, is based on already available candy. At least in Sweden we have these banana shaped thingies (about as big as my pinkie), tasting like banana marshmallows covered in chocolate, called “skumbananer”, which means foam bananas. Now, the easy way to make these would be to make chocolate macaron shells and some banana flavored filling, but then we wouldn't use the banana chips, so we did it the other way around instead! Granted, macaron shells made of banana chips is a bit experimental, but since we decided to blog about it, it either turned out fine, or spectacularly failed. Either way it's worth reading the rest of the post, right? :-)

So, for the shells, we decided to substitute some of the almonds for banana chips, it ended up being about 70 % of the almonds that were substituted, giving a recipe along these lines:

200 g Confectioner's Sugar
100 g Egg whites
30 g Sugar
30 g Almonds
70 g Banana chips

Scold and grind the almonds, grind the banana chips, and mix the two in a large bowl with the confectioner's sugar. Whip the egg whites and sugar into a light meringue (soft peaks), and fold it all together. Don't over work it! Use a plain tip pastry bag to make small rounds on parchment covered baking sheets and let them sit for at least 30 minutes before baking at 175°C for 7 minutes.

Let the shells cool before prying them off the baking sheets.

Now, having made the macaron shells is really only half the story, but I wont give you any recipe for chocolate creme here, just use whatever you like. Any ganache will work like a charm. Jenny made a plain dark chocolate one (cream and dark chocolate, period) for me to fill these ones with. As you can see from the pictures, it's a bit runny, but will probably stiffen up after one more day in the fridge.

So far so good, now for the $10k question: will it fly? Certainly not, but metaphorically speaking it might make you take off if you're really into that whole foam banana taste. It's really weird, but the banana chips make the shells more airy and lighter, like foam. I know we sort of had this in mind, but we didn't really expect it to work this well... ah well, you take the good with the rest! Fingers crossed they'll even make it through the freezer. Which they did (I'm writing this post anachronistically, the beauties in the pictures have actually been frozen and then thawed)!



Just a note on pronunciation of the title: it's obviously a contraction of Bananarama (a band which is incidentally as old as Jenny, alluding to the flavors involved) and macarons, but how should it be pronounced? There's two possibilities: bananarama-carons or bananara-macarons, and I personally prefer the first one. Don't know what “carons” are, but this way they at least taste good!