I have been making all sorts of crazy flavours lately and my colleague requested her favourite flavour – vanilla.  A good vanilla dessert calls for good quality vanilla bean, not any of the imitation stuff. I’ve used seeds from vanilla bean to flavour the shells and then a Heilala vanilla paste to flavour the buttercream. The result was a gorgeously balanced vanilla flavour that reminds me of vanilla milkshakes. Sometimes the simplest is the best!

Macarons shell ingredients
150 g icing sugar
150 g almond meal
110 g egg whites, split into 2 bowls of 55g each
150 g caster sugar
38 ml water
1 g meringue powder
seeds from 1 vanilla bean

Follow my basic recipe to make the shells.

I paired these with a Vanilla Bean buttercream.

Filling Ingredients:
100g butter, room temperature
100g icing sugar
1 tbsp good quality vanilla bean paste (I used Heilala)

Instructions:
Beat butter until soft in a mixer. Add icing sugar and mix well. Add vanilla bean paste and mix. Fill a piping bag and pipe a small dollop of buttercream on half of your shells and top them with the remaining half of your shells.

The filled macarons need to be kept in the fridge for 24 hours for the filling to flavour the shells.