McDonald’s Japan won’t sell you a Caramel Macaron dessert burger, so we made our own

Sometimes, you just have to take the craziness into your own hands.

Japan has a surprisingly rich burger culture, and so we’re always on the lookout for the next culinary creation. So no sooner had we finished digesting Burger King’s Tokyo Teriyaki Tower than a new burger temptation from McDonald’s Japan caught our eye.

6/30(水)から #マックカフェ に #マカロン塩キャラメル が期間限定で登場ほどよい塩味のキャラメルクリームをサンドしたマカロン暑くなる季節にぴったりの期間限定フレーバー、ぜひお試しください

※143店舗McCafé by Barista® 限定https://t.co/gCtp2ZAUzf pic.twitter.com/DVOopeSM9B

— マクドナルド (@McDonaldsJapan) June 22, 2021

Oh, wait, sorry. It turns out that that’s actually not a burger at all, but a macaron. See, select McDonald’s branches in Japan offer the chain’s sub-brand of McCafé by Barista café-style beverages and desserts, and they recently added a new salty caramel macaron to the menu.

Still, it really does look like a hamburger, doesn’t it? At a glance, you could mistake the smooth cookie portions at the top and bottom for buns, and the two ruffled sections (each called a “pied”) for a pair of patties.

▼ How McDonald’s salty caramel macaron initially looked to our burger-focused brains

Of course, McDonald’s itself doesn’t offer officially offer anything as weird as a Salty Caramel Macaron Burger…so we had no choice but to make one ourselves.

▼ To those of you saying “Wait, isn’t just not making a dessert burger an option?” we’d like to say thank you for visiting SoraNews24 for the first time!

For our recipe, we’ll need:
● 5 McDonald’s Salty Caramel Macarons
● 2 regular McDonald’s hamburgers

The reason for using regular hamburgers, as opposed to something more deluxe like a Big Mac, isn’t because we’re cheap, but because we’re going to be removing everything except the meat and buns, in keeping with the simplicity of the deluded mental image we got from McDonald’s macaron tweet. And while we’re unapologetic gluttons, the reason we’re using two burgers is because we need two patties.

Once we’d removed all the burgers’ extra toppings and sauce, we turned out attention to the macarons. To scoop out their caramel cream filling, we used a chopstick, but a spatula should also do the trick.

The generous volume of filling for each macaron is a testament to the high quality of McCafé by Barista’s desserts. As we removed it from the cookies, we started layering it on top of one of the patties, and we ended up with an impressive mound that looked a little like the topping of an unidon (sea urchin rice bowl)/

Now all that was left to do was the final assembly of placing the second bun on top of the filling…

…and crowning it all with the top bun.

▼ Viola (macarons are a French confectionary, after all)

Curious to see if our madness was also delicious, we took a bite. It’s kind of hard to brace yourself one way for another for a flavor combination as unorthodox as this, so we were startled when the taste was somehow familiar, despite the fact that we, like everyone else on the planet, had never eaten a Salty Caramel Macaron Burger before. So we took another bite, and then we had it…

…it tastes like peanut butter! It’s not an exact match, but something about the mixture of the caramel and meat gave it a nutty heartiness, and the flavor isn’t nearly as weird as we’d initially imagined it was going to be.

That said, this is still using a dessert as a condiment, and the sweet sensation gets strong pretty quickly. If we were going to try this again, we’d use less cream (five macarons’ worth turned out to be more than we’d expected), and maybe add a dash or two of pepper to balance out some of the sweetness. Still, our flash of strange inspiration turned out better than it had any right to, and considering that it’s both a sandwich and a dessert in every bite, this really does qualify as fast food.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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