French Macarons Inspired by Thanksgiving Pies

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When I think about Thanksgiving, I think about eating a heavy meal followed by some heavy desserts, so this year I decided to change it up a bit and create some great light French Macarons inspired by Thanksgiving pies.

The first macaron was a cinnamon macaron with a pumpkin frosting, aka “Pumpkin Pie”, and the second was a “Pecan Pie” which was a pecan macaron with a creamy caramel filling.

Although I can’t divulge the exact macaron recipes, I can tell you that for the cinnamon ones, I simply added a teaspoon of cinnamon to a standard macaron recipes and for the pecan one, I ground up pecans in a food processor and substituted them for half of the almond flour.

Here are the recipes for the 2 fillings:

Pumpkin Buttercream:

1/2 sticks of unsalted butter at room temp
1/4 c. pumpkin puree
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ginger
1/8 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. vanilla extract
2 oz. confectioner’s sugar (more or less)

Cream butter, pumpkin and spices. Slowly add sugar until the buttercream is no longer seperated by the pumpkin.

Caramel filling:
1 cup sugar
3 ounces unsalted butter
1/2 cup heavy cream, at room temperature
Place sugar in a saucepan over medium heat. When you can start to see the sugar melting, you’ll see a caramel colored liquid, start to slowly stir the non-melted sugar into the melted area. Stir until all of the sugar is incorporated and smooth. When the sugar is a lovely dark copper color and you can smell that it smells adequately caramelized, turn off the heat, add the butter all at once, and stir it in. Then add the cream, stir to incorporate, and store in glass jars in the refrigerator.
To assemble the macarons:
Carefully peel the macarons off the silpat or parchment paper they were baked on and pair them up with a similar sized and shaped macaron. Pour each filling into a piping bag. Pipe caramel onto the pecan macarons bottoms and pumpkin onto the cinnamon bottoms. Then match up the remaining cookies and serve!
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