Vanilla Bean Macarons and the World's Greatest Buttercream

When your grandmother hands you a tube with five vanilla beans and says "make more macarons," you tend to take her seriously. Luckily enough, the choir I'm in was in charge of food for a church event a few days later and I had agreed (obviously) to make macarons. (Since trying these, the choir director has requested that I teach a macaron making class. Obviously, these were winners.)

Now if you think these are somehow boring because they're vanilla, then you should feel ashamed of yourself. Did you not read the title where it said VANILLA *BEAN*?? This is not your cheap "vanilla" what-is-this-crap "flavor." This is true vanilla. Just enough to say "holy sweet baby Jesus, this is the best vanilla thing I have tasted in my lifetime, or at least since I last had good creme brulee."

Go ahead and set out everything for your icing. If you like, you can measure out your heavy cream in a bowl or something so the whole thing doesn't stay out. In fact, I'm about 99% sure that's what I did, but I've slept since then, so who really knows. But DEFINITELY have the butter out so it can get closer to room temp, if not all the way there.

This is a vanilla bean pod that's been cut in half, and one half had it's first scraping. Those teensy blackbrown dots on the cutting board? THOSE are the actual beans. And oh sweet Mary, do they smell diviiiiine. To make scraping the beans out easier, I cut them in half like you see above, then cut a slit from the hard tip to your cut end. Boom! Easy access has never been sweeter.

There are THOUSANDS of beans in there. Scrape as many as you can without getting the pod in there. A little pulp from the inside is fine, although snooty people say otherwise. I am obviously as snooty as a shot of Jack Daniels in a glass of lemonade. All to say, you probably won't get every dang one. This is okay. Also, they'll get on your fingers. This is also okay.

SO MANY SEEDS! Just run the tip of your knife down the inside of the pod and they'll collect like little magnetized shavings. It's pretty awesome. Oh, and yes, your cutting board will get stained. Boo hoo. Oh well.

This was when I had finished. Note the lack of beans? There's your sign. Just throw these things in the garbage disposal. Bonus, your kitchen will smell EVEN MORE like vanilla.

Sift your almond flour and powdered sugar and stir together to make your Not Bisquick mix using your BFF, Jill. If your hard spatula is named Jill.

Here was my seedy harvest. Heh. Heheh. Seedy harvest. Heh.

Alright, now remember to froth your egg whites until they look like ginger ale, right? Before you think of adding in sugar, put in your vanilla bean. I used my knife and just tapped to loosen them.

NOW you can dump in your sugar and proceed to watch the magic happen.

Let it be on a low setting until the mixture's all happy, then crank that sucker up. POOF!

Watching the vanilla beans swirl around in there nearly made me drool.

Your final meringue. Honestly, I could've eaten this on my own. Maybe I did...it was just the beaters, come on!

Look at that. Just admire that beauty. Also, lament the fact that my fancy camera hasn't been fixed yet.

Macarronager time! Oh, I guess I left the heavy cream on the counter after all. Oh well. The shells got whipped up pretty quickly.

Your final folded beany concoction of awesome. Slop it in that pastry bag and pipe away on your parchment paper.

I had this adorable idea to sprinkle black sugar on the shells before baking. And honestly, the two shells that got sprinkled looked pretty dang cute. But they did this to my fingers, and later my teeth, so...don't do that. Kaygreat. Stick em in the oven at 325F (convection bake) for 11 to 12 minutes.

The buttercream. YES, it matters that you use unsalted AND salted. Just do it, okay? You'll love me for it if you do. Also, be forewarned: you're gonna have a vat of buttercream on your hands. No joke.

Obviously, my butter wasn't quite soft enough. So what did I do? Cut it, duh.

Yes, this is a lot of butter. WORTH IT.

And yes, it's gonna do the damn butter cluster on your mixer. Scoop it out and give it a stern talking to and it should cooperate.

When you start to get veritable butter walls on the side of the bowl, you're making progress. The butter will also be SUPER light.

Scrape it all down, theeere we go. Almost there...

BOOM. That's just the butter. Yup. Like I said. VAT. Add in your heavy cream and vanilla and let it mix on medium for a bit to get it happy.

THEN POWDERED SUGAR INSANITY.

IF YOU THOUGHT I WAS JOKING ABOUT YOUR VAT OF BUTTERCREAM, THINK AGAIN. Start mixing SLOWLY so it doesn't look like you've had a coke party in there. Don't get me wrong, some will escape. But it is 10000000% worth it.

It'll shrink in size, but let it fluff back up again. It'll basically go to the top of the bowl on my mixer.

Get out a ridged piping tip and swirl some icing in there. No being scant with it! This doesn't require a double layer, though, since the piping normally makes it thick enough and this stuff is RICH.

There you have it. (And yes, for some reason my macarons had little tips. And then I realized "oh great, my macarons for church have little tips that got brown and now they look like little *tits*, aren't I just the most reverent Episcopalian on the planet?!" So when this happens, lay them on their side and no one will know the damn difference.)

This is how much I had left after icing all of them. And sampling the icing myself. And giving a sample to my mom. And letting the dog have a teensy bit because she was giving me doe eyes. I iced some gluten-free lime bars with this and STILL have enough for a sheetcake left over. So...yeah. It makes a lot. But it's so, so, SO worth it in every way.