In a medium sized bowl, sift 100g of the icing sugar, and 50g of the ground almonds. Its very important that you sift it, as this will prevent any lumps.
In a second medium sized bowl, do the same with the other 100g of the icing sugar, and 50g of the ground almonds.
In a stand mixer, add your egg whites. Make sure the bowl and whisk you are using are spotlessly clean first!
Whisk the egg whites up to stiff peaks, and start adding the caster sugar teaspoon by teaspoon until all is incorporated. Whisk for another minute or so afterwards.
Add half of the meringue mixture to one of the bowls of sugar/almonds. It should weight about 87/88g to make sure you're nearer half.
In that bowl, add the 1 tsp of vanilla and fold the mixture carefully but making sure that it is all incorporated.
The next step is called 'macaronage' where you basically press and wipe the mixture around the edges of the bowl to sort of de-fluff it in a way. It smooths the mixture out, making it better.
With the other half of the meringue, add the pink food colouring and Strawberry Extract and whisk until combined. Add this to the sugar/almond mix and repeat the folding and macaronage.
With a disposable piping bag, add a small round tip. Carefully pipe the mixtures onto some macaron mats. The mixture does spread naturally, so don't pipe them that large otherwise they might end up touching.
You should end up with equal amounts of pink shells, and vanilla shells.
Once piped, tap the trays onto the work surface 5-6 times to get any air bubbles out, and leave on the side for 1 hour to form a skin.
Towards the end of the hour, turn your oven on to 130C Fan.
Once the hour is up, put the macarons in the oven to bake for 16-20 minutes. I usually go more towards 20 minutes.
Leave them to cool full on the mats before peeling them off.
Once cooled, make your ganache - add your dark chocolate to a bowl, chopped up. Heat your cream in a pan until its just starting to boil, and pour it over the dark chocolate.
Leave it to sit for 5 minutes, and then stir together. Leave again for 5 minutes to cool slightly, and then add to a piping bag.
Pipe a smallish amount into the middle of all of the strawberry or vanilla macarons, and then sandwich on the opposite colour/flavour.
Put them into the fridge for the ganache to set for an hour or so, and then enjoy!
These Macarons will last for up to one week in the fridge.
You don't have to use strawberry extract, but its the easiest way to get the strawberry flavouring in the macarons. You could easily just colour them pink if you wanted the affect, but without the flavouring.
I will post a Youtube video of making macarons asap!
If you don't want to fill the shells immediately, still store them in the fridge.