GIRLIE OREO MACARONS

Oreo cookies buzzed up in a Blizzard from Dairy Queen are my idea of summer. There's nothing better than sittin' against a log on the beach watching the sun set into English Bay while slowly scraping the slender plastic red spoon across the craggy soft-serve vanilla ice cream studded with brown-black cookie chunks.

Summer is slowly slipping away and the evenings are chillier in Vancouver. Instead of the Blizzard, fall beckons me to create macarons!

Though you won't find pink anywhere in my wardrobe, for some reason I find it a very appealing colour contrast for anything chocolate. Pink and brown are fabulous together and in terms of baked goods, you've seen how well they go over in my Girlie Chocolate Buttermilk Cupcakes! Yummo!

I was aiming for the flavours of an oreo cookie but I wanted something more girlie and more delicate. I think Oreo cookies with a pink filling instead of white would be such a big seller! I know my kid would be dragging me down the local cookie aisle for them.

So, instead of the shortening-laden oreo-cookie filling, I grabbed a huge hunk of white chocolate from my wine fridge. By the way, did I tell you that along with my red wine, I've been storing chocolate in my wine fridge? I've been doing this for years. It's so working out for me! The chocolate never gets a bloom, and it never melts in the summer. My two favourite things in one special little temperature-controlled environment. Unorthodox, yes, but I love it.

The white chocolate buttercream...well, it was so delicious! I totally winged it and just chopped up about 6 oz of some Callebaut white chocolate, melted it and added it to my buttercream in the mixer. The texture of the filling turned out to be like that of oreo cookie filling and the flavour was definitively of white chocolate. And any buttercream tastes better when it's pink! To my trusty tried and true favourite basic macaron recipe, I added a couple of tablespoons of dark cocoa powder to the batter. My macaron shells were topped with organic crushed cocoa nibs. They were a lovely textural contrast and injected another dimension of cocoa flavour to the delicate French cookie. I loved how the pink white chocolate buttercream contrasted with the dark cocoa macaron shells. They were so edible.

There you have it: my Girlie Oreo Macarons