Funky Monkey Macarons

This month's MacTweets Challenge comes hot on the heels of my trip to Food Blogger Connect, in London. It was an incredible trip, one of the best things being tha I finally got to meet a few of my fellow MacTweeters like Cecilia with her One Vanilla Bean, Bethany and all of her Dirty Kitchen Secrets, Pam a.k.a. the Cooking Ninja, Sarah, who lives at the fabulous Maison Cupcake, the fabulous Mowie of Mowielicious fame, and the darling Meeta, who asks What's For Lunch Honey? In anticipation of this trip, however, I was most excited to finally meet the brilliant Jamie, one of our fearless MacTweets leaders, who writes beautiful stories about how Life's A Feast - and she is just as sweet and kind as I had hoped she would be.

For this month's challenge, Jamie & Deeba (who was unable to attend FBC) challenged us to "Walk on the Wild Side" with our wild animal inspired macarons. I have to admit, I was a bit stumped by this one for a while, if only because I don't always associate many wild animals with my food. If only I had seen this beautiful fella, sitting in the lobby of the Hempel Hotel in London, before I made my macs (he's the perfect embodiment of this challenge!)

A few days before I left for the conference, hubby was called away for a business trip, which meant I was on my own for a few days. Typical of moest people, we each have our different food likes & dislikes, and when we are apart, we tend to indulge in the things the other hates. When I am out of town, hubby gets to enjoy all the soup he wants (that's right - I'm a freak, I hate soup. Even the smell of it makes me gag), and when I'm on my own, I go and get myself a few bananas for simple treats like bananas & cream (a childhood fav), banana bread or bananas foster over ice cream. Spying them sitting on the counter one night, inspiration struck and the Funky Monkey Macaron was born...

I whipped up a batch of chocolate macaron shells, which turned out quite pale compared to previous batches of chocolate macs, and then got to work on making a delicious banana pastry cream for the filling. I dug through all of my recipe books, looking at recipes for banana cream pie, but every recipe simply layered slices of banana in the pastry cream-filled shell. This was not what I was looking for, so I decided to just add a single mashed banana to my favourite pastry cream recipe. That's when I discovered why the pie is made with slices... pastry cream with a banana blended in does not set up. I learned the hard way that the custard that normally firms up just enough to stay in place in a pie shell or pâte à choux becomes a delicious but runny mess when you add a mashed banana. I'll try making it again, adjusing the recipe to see if I can get it to gel, or if all else fails, next time hubby's out of town and I bake with bananas, I'll just blend them into chocolate ganache, or else take a lesson from Pierre Herme and add a tiny piece of banana in the centre.

So while they may not have turned out quite as pretty as I had hoped, they did turn out to be quite yummy. If anyone out there has a recipe for a tasty banana filling that actually sets up, I invite you to give this one a try, and let me know how it works out for you.

The recipes for both the macaron shells and the basic, non runny pastry cream can both be found in previous posts on this blog. Just click on the link and it will take you there!