earl grey macarons

A couple of weekends ago, I met up with my besties Sue and Cecila for a girls day, which included an afternoon tea lunch, shopping, and lounging at the spa.  I wanted to make something for us to snack on, and since I've been experimenting with tea-flavored ice creams lately, I thought tea-flavored macarons would be perfect!

I decided to make earl grey macarons, along with another batch of the lemon macarons that I made earlier this month.  For the earl grey macarons, I sprinkled a bit of minced earl grey tea on the tops of the shells, and made an earl grey brown-butter cream cheese filling to go inside.

I could barely taste the earl grey in the filling though (I had added a few teaspoons of concentrated earl grey tea, which I had steeped with one tea bag and a couple of tablespoons of boiling water), so I decided to add a bit of the minced steeped leaves into the filling as well.  That seemed to help add a bit more earl grey flavor, but it still was very faint.

We ended up having a fun and relaxing day out.  There were a lot of leftover macarons though - good thing I brought ziplock baggies so that the girls could bring them home!

earl grey ice cream

Last week I made jasmine tea ice cream, and I liked it so much that I wanted to try it with earl grey tea also.  I know it doesn't look very different from the jasmine ice cream, but I decided to post about it anyway (especially since I just bought these adorable little serving bowls from Anthropologie, and I wanted to use them for the pictures!)

I didn't have any loose leaf earl grey, so I used 5 tea bags instead.  Other than that, I followed all the same steps for infusing the tea and making the custard base.  However, when I was straining the tea from the custard, I pressed a bit too hard with the spatula and ended up breaking a few of the tea bags.  So I ended up with tiny specks of tea leaves in my custard, which were too small to strain out.

But it turned out fine - the specks were too small to really notice, plus it added a nice speckled look to the ice cream!