Lemon Mascarpone Macarons

This past week I finally found time to bake some more French macarons. I couldn't believe I hadn't made these since last year. Last time I used David Lebovitz's recipe for Chocolate French Macarons with a few modifications. This time I went with Not So Humble Pie's recipe from her fabulous Macaron 101: French Meringue tutorial. I followed her recipe and directions for macarons, save I decided to grind my own almonds after getting crackled tops on some chocolate macarons that I made with Good Foods almond flour (I couldn't find Bob's Red Mill almond flour that she suggested using).

I left my macaron shells plain and colored them with a bit of yellow gel dye. For the filling, I used Not So Humble Pie's recipe for Mascarpone Lemon Filling. I used store bought lemon curd in my filling to save time. Strangely I had difficulties with the texture of the filling. After thoroughly mixing the mascarpone cheese and lemon curd together, I couldn't get the mixture to firm back up, despite an entire night in the fridge. After a few hours in the freezer, the mixture was firm enough to pipe, but would warm back up to a oozing mess. I basically had to pipe a thin layer of the filling on a macaron shell and then let the filling set up in the fridge before I could sandwich with another macaron shell (otherwise the filling would just ooze right out). I'm not sure what caused this problem as the mascarpone cheese and lemon curd separately were both firm while cold before mixing, and Not So Humble Pie's macarons appeared to have a firm and stable filling.

The filling was absolutely divine despite the issues it gave me. I thought the tartness of the filling was an absolute perfect pairing with the sweet macaron shells. Unfortunately I couldn't fill the macarons with as much of the filling as I would have liked, since it would just ooze out. These little macarons were absolutely heavenly nonetheless. I'm dreaming of all the different fruit curds I could pair with mascarpone cheese to fill future macarons. I think a macaron with homemade strawberry curd would be splendid!

Most of my macarons baked up with slightly lopsided feet. I guess it's time that I invest in some new baking sheets and precut parchment sheets.

Lemon Mascarpone Macarons
Ms. Humble's Scatter Plot Macarons + Not So Humble Mascarpone Lemon Filling

* The vintage floral napkin in the background of these photos was from de Epoca, a darling vintage shop on Etsy. I won a gift card from de Epoca back in February and I picked out two sets of lovely vintage floral napkins! I'm sure they'll be turning up in many of my photos.