Matcha & Yokan Macarons

AKA the most time consuming macarons EVER.    Each mac took probably 3 - 7 minutes to pipe.  I am pretty happy with how they turned out though.  And the filling is GOOOOD!

I was inspired by a japanese red bean dessert called yokan.  Every year around the holidays my mom gets little boxes of goodies sent to her by her family and friends in japan.  Quite often yokan is included from a famous shop in Tokyo that my mom claims is the "best."  This year there was a little 3 pack that included plain, water chestnut, and green tea.  My mom let me pick one to bring home with me and I picked green tea, yum!

Anyway, I've been wanting to to a matcha macaron for a while and this dessert reminded me of that.  So for the filling I decided to do a matcha white chocolate ganache with a little square of plain yokan in the middle.


The resting macs..

To be honest for the ganache, I sorta winged it.  I had only part of a bar of white chocolate in the apartment, so I weighed it and it came out to 85 grams.  I poured 1/4 a cup of boiling cream over it and stirred them together with a spatula.  After the chocolate and cream were completely incorporated, I added about 3 tablespoons of matcha power (you can do this to taste) and stirred to combine.  After the mixture was cooled I beat it together with half a stick of room temp butter to give it some extra creaminess and to lighten the color a bit (it was a really dark army green).

And thats it!  Tasted like high quality green tea ice cream.  You could barely taste the white chocolate, it just gave off a small hint of sweetness.  Luckily I have some extra that may or may not be eaten with a spoon in about 5 minutes...