Macaron cake for Monie and Pandan Macarons for Karen...

My friend Mona had her last day at work yesterday before moving interstate to a new job. I made this macaron cake for her farewell afternoon tea.

For the cake, any chocolate cake recipe will do - an easy one is Martha Stewart's Devil's Food Cake, and you can find the recipe here.

I sandwiched the cake with a chocolate cream (whipped cream with Dutched cocoa and some sugar), then covered it with dark chocolate ganache (equal parts dark chocolate and cream).

For the shells, I just made one batch of the generic macaron recipe and divided it into bowls with food colouring - you can be smart with colours and add blue to pink once you've piped some pink ones to make purple, and add red to yellow to make orange, etc. Arrange the macaron shells on the cake whilst the ganache is still soft.

One of my other friends, Karen, had a baby last week and has been having cravings for pandan macarons for weeks.

For the shells, stick with the Generic Macaron Recipe here. Add green colouring to the mixture. If you have some shredded coconut handy, sprinkle some onto the shells before resting (unfortunately I couldn't find any in my pantry!)

For the filling, I cheated by using pandan essence which I bought from an Asian grocery store on Victoria Street in Richmond. You could probably use real pandan leaves and infuse some cream and make ganache from that.

I added the pandan essence to white chocolate ganache, and I'm told that they definitely tasted of pandan!