MacKay Cracks Macs

We have a macadamia tree in our back yard. 

White chocolate macadamia cookie
and vanilla ice cream sandwich

We didn’t realize it was a macadamia tree until we bumped into the woman doing renovations on the house next door collecting some of the nuts and she told us what she was up to. We had seen another neighbour out collecting the nuts - which are big round hard things that come out of even bigger harder husks - but didn’t know what they were or why anyone would want to collect them. In our ignorance, we’d been using one of them as a replacement for the ball in a foosball table.

Now we know.

We were pretty late to the party, but the tree is very generous. There were still a good number of nuts on the ground in July, and I collected as many as I could find. They sat on the counter for weeks while I considered what to do with them, and how to get them open. 

The woman who told me they were macadamias advised that she used a hammer to open them. Could I use a hammer? Upon what would I hammer them? And with what would I hold them while I hammered, so as not to pelt Drew and Marmalade with flying macadamia nuts?

Aussie Mac Cracker with one in the chamber

The solution was much more elegant: the Aussie Mac Cracker, a specially designed device for cracking open macadamia nuts. 

To use it, you put a macadamia nut in the bottom where there's a little divot to help hold it in place, and then, grasping the body of the cracker firmly in one hand, you twist the screw down with the other hand until you hear the very loud snap of the nut popping open. I had to take a few more twists to break the shell further because they're incredibly sturdy. 

Once the shells were cracked, though, things were easy. Most of the nuts were just sitting inside, softly rattling around in their half-brown half-cream interiors. 

I managed to get an entire cup of macadamia nuts, which was enough to make a batch of white chocolate macadamia cookies. AKA The best cookies ever! 

We used them to make ice cream sandwiches for our friends.

I am so pumped about this discovery. Though my hands were hurting after the work of getting the nuts out of their shells (and I have a cut on my thumb from a shard of shell), I cannot wait for February/March, when the tree starts to drop nuts again. We will not miss out next season! I shall horde them all and bake dozens of cookies! 

The inside of a macadamia shell