Gingerbread Macaron

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Perfectly delicious and packed with amazing gingerbread flavor, these Gingerbread Macaron have the best cream cheese buttercream filling.  The combination of flavors and cute Sprinkle Pop decorations make these irresistible!  

This post is sponsored on behalf of #ChristmasCookiesWeek. The generous sponsors, Yum Goggle, Sprinkle Pop, Silpat and Adams Extracts have provided us with products for recipe creation and a giveaway for our readers. As always, all opinions are my own.

I’m addicted to gingerbread.  There!  I’m just going to come right out and say it.  No keeping secrets from y’all!!  Seriously.  I do, though.  They’re my favorite cookie in the whole world!  I love gingerbread bread, muffins, cakes; you name it.  If it has gingerbread spice in it I will love it.

Last year I made these adorable gingerbread cookies.  I know.  They’re nekkid.  I’m not a huge decorator.  However, I will be stepping up with that this year.  I just hope they work out.  Anyway, they were so good!  I think I ate them all.  Every.last.one.  I’m glad the hubs isn’t a fan of them so I could just devour them without remorse.

Now, this is my second attempt at making gingerbread macaron.  I tried my hand at them MANY years ago.  Wow.  It’s been five.  FIVE years!  Can you believe it?  While they were tasty, they just didn’t look too pretty.  And they didn’t have the gingerbread spice mix I received from Raw Spice Bar.

You see, when I opened that package up and took one sniff I knew I wanted to make macaron with it.  It has THE most intoxicating gingerbread spice aroma.  I couldn’t even have imagined something that smelled as wonderful as that.  It made me almost want to just eat it with a spoon, but I knew that wouldn’t be too good.

 

So, I waited.  Impatiently I might add. 

I waited until it was time to make some holiday cookies.  The excitement of baking these gingerbread macaron was too much for me to handle.  However, there was one thing I didn’t take into consideration and I was almost deflated when I figured it out.

I didn’t take unto consideration the oils in the spice mix.  Oils and meringue don’t go well together.  I didn’t think about that when I used the liquid food coloring.  The gel would have been a better way to go, but I had a recipe for brown with drops of food coloring and not gel.  How do you do drops with gel?  Or don’t you?

Anyway, the combination of the liquid food dye AND the oils in the spice mix made the shells spread way thinner than I anticipated.  Which made the cookies bigger than anticipated.  I think almost everyone who ate one commented on how big they were.  I had to explain that the oils and food dye… blah blah blah.  “Oh!  Didn’t know that.”  How would you?  You don’t bake macaron! 

Even though they spread bigger than I anticipated, they still had those perfect pied, that crispy outside, and the chewy middle.  To top it all off, the cream cheese buttercream filling was the best I had ever made!  I need to make sure and repeat that recipe when I make the carrot cake macaron for Easter.  Those are still in the works.

 

These gingerbread macaron have the most intoxication aroma.

They made my work bag smell amazing.  They made my office smell amazing which made them irresistible for people to stop by and try.  The sweet shell packed with gingerbread flavor is the perfect vessel for the sweet and slightly tart cream cheese buttercream.  I really outdid myself on those cookies.  I might have to make them again this year.   That’s how good they really are!

Of course, it also helps that they’re decorated with such cute little snowmen sprinkles on top.  And such a festive roll in Sprinkle Pops Oh Snow Cute sprinkle mix.  The combination of the blue, red, silver, and white sprinkles matched perfectly with the towel I have!  I mean, I couldn’t have picked out a better combination.  The towel wasn’t even in my mind when I requested these sprinkles.  But, they look perfect together, don’t you think?

I have to confess that I’m not a huge sprinkle person.  I have a ton of them that I haven’t even used.  However, when these came in the mail from Sprinkle Pop, I was hooked!  There are so many different sizes and decorations in this mix.  It has large and small balls of red, blue, white, and silver.  There are silver bars that I can’t wait to use on the snowflake cookies you’ll see later.

And how can anyone resist those adorable little snowmen sprinkles?

The colors didn’t bleed or fade like those other sprinkles in my pantry.  Maybe that’s why I’m not a huge sprinkles fan; they bleed and fade.  They tasted delicious and not funky; like those others.  You can start to see why I’m not a sprinkles fan, right?  And you can also see why I’m becoming a huge Sprinkle Pop fan!

They have such festive mixes for the holiday season.  You can get a mix of a bunch of types of sprinkles. It is fun digging around in those and separate out the elements you want to use.  Or you can purchase confetti like these little gingerbread men.  ADORBS!  They have trees, snowflakes, candy canes, and holly confetti.  It really was difficult to try to pic two for my holiday baking, but I did settle on the Oh Snow Cute and the Winter Wonderland mix.

I do have to be careful, though because I’m sure the hubs wouldn’t appreciate me adding more sprinkles to the pantry.  I may have to toss those others and replace them with more Sprinkle Pop mixes.  The next batch I’m ordering are the glitter stars.  Imagine those on some New Year’s Eve macaron.  Too fancy, right?

So, true story.  I shared these with a dude on the bus I ride when I get off the train.  He said they were awesome.  The rest I brought to work vanished.  However, I still had a small amount that I was saving for the photo shoot.

Fast forward 4 days.  The same dude asked me about the cookies I had the previous week.  It just so happened that I had the rest of them with me.  I gave him one and the other dude a cookie that we ride the bus with.  He admitted they were fabulous, too.

 

Win win in my book!

One of them is a foodie, too.  He has skills in the kitchen and has made macaron himself.  For me, that’s a total win!!  Because my hubs and co-workers, while they could have had macaron at some point, they’re not the greatest judge of the quality of my macaron.  You know what I mean?  They’re slightly biased and might not have branched out to more sophisticated cooking.

Of course, everyone commented on how festive the colors and sprinkles were on these macaron.  I mean, just look at them!  You can’t help but smile and feel happy at seeing those snowmen sprinkles on these macaron.  And the colors of those sprinkles!  I don’t see how anyone can’t be in the spirit after seeing these cookies.  They’re just so stinking festive!

And how can you resist that cuteness?  Those little snowmen are just perfect sitting on top of these macaron.  You can almost smell the gingerbread and taste the hot chocolate served up after a cold day playing in the snow.  Because that’s what we all love about snow, right?  Playing in it and then coming home to delicious hot chocolate and cookies.

I hope you visit the Sprinkle Pop website to find these cute sprinkles and any others that inspire you!  To stay up to date on all their new products and ideas on decorating your delicious desserts with them, follow them on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

#ChristmasCookiesWeek Monday Recipes

• Brown Sugar Ornament Cookies by Jolene’s Recipe Journal
• Butter Pecan Nuggets by Grumpy’s Honeybunch
• Chocolate Espresso Brown Sugar Cookies by Faith, Hope, Love, & Luck Survive Despite a Whiskered Accomplice
• Chocolate-Cherry Snowballs by Red Cottage Chronicles
• Christmas Macarons by A Day in the Life on the Farm
• Christmas Rosette Sugar Cookies by Love and Confections
• Classic Spritz by Books n’ Cooks
• Gingerbread Macaron by A Kitchen Hoor’s Adventures
• Peppermint Cookie Dough Truffles by Cindy’s Recipes and Writings
• Peppermint Meltaways by Hezzi-D’s Books and Cooks
• Peppermint Thins by Palatable Pastime
• Sour Cream Decorated Cookies by The Freshman Cook
• Spiced Chocolate Molasses Cookies by Karen’s Kitchen Stories

Thank you to Ellen at Family Around the Table and Christie at A Kitchen Hoor’s Adventures for hosting #ChristmasCookiesWeek.

Disclaimer: Thank you #ChristmasCookiesWeek sponsors: Adams Extract, Sprinkle Pop, Yum Goggle and Silpat for providing the prizes free of charge.