MacarAWESOMEs

Ha. Hah. Hahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

SUCK ON THESE, MOTHERF***ERS! 

Motherf**king Macaroons

Ok, I've calmed down now, and I apologise if the shift from my usually calm and polite demeanour offended any polite sensibilities. But you must understand that I was really starting to think I had been cursed. Turns out I wasn't, in fact, I am the John McClane of macaroons. Well, in Die Hard (Dies Hard? What's the plural? Is it like Gins and Tonic?) 1 and 2 anyway. I'm Bruce Willis and the macaroons are my estranged wife. EXCEPT THEY'RE NOT ESTRANGED ANYMORE, BABY! (It must be understood that the analogy ends here. The macaroons had better not leave me to move to California.)

Me	The Macaroons

I'm just so happy the damned things finally worked! Unfortunately I have no real idea what happened to make them so, but I did stop buying ground almonds from Lidl. Could that have been it? The recipe is that of The Great British Bake Off (which, ironically, is a French macaroon recipe...), without the cream of tartar and with a pinch of salt in its place. They are raspberry flavoured, as I was determined to try again after the sink disaster, but using powdered red food colouring instead of the six-years-out-of-date-liquid-stuff I used the last time. And I wondered why they didn't work... They're sandwiched together with a raspberry buttercream (Probably what an Hermès scarf tastes like...Actually that sounds gross. Ignore.) 


Anyway, I must admit that these still aren't perfect. In fact, their flaws are manifold. However, now that I've stopped creating crunchy bullets and started producing actual macaroons, I can at least analyse them:


Flaw 1: They're not very pink. Unfortunately I think it might be to do with my fan oven rather than any (lack of) skill on my part - I actually baked these at a lower temperature (180) than usual, for slightly longer, but they still turned out a light, sandy beige, but BEAUTIFULLY pink on the inside. Solution: more food colouring, probably...


Flaw 2: THEY HAVE FEET! Ok, obviously that's not a flaw (if you understand that macaroons are meant to have feet, that is. If you don't, I admit it sounds creepy) but they don't have very much of a foot


Flaw 3: They're pretty flat. This could mean that they were either undermixed, or overmixed. Not particularly helpful. Could also have been cooked too long (says Ms Humble Pie) although I doubt it, since when I looked through the oven door and nearly fell flat on my back when I saw they were developing feet (I was astounded. I was convinced this batch was another dud) I opened it up to take a quick pick, to make sure I wasn't imagining things. Anyway, they were pretty flat then too.


Flaw 4: Some of the macaroons looked like the embryos of conjoined twins...

When skin grafts go wrong...

Um. I think that one is to do with the pastry chef being too lazy to use a piping bag.


Anyway, I have no doubt that the next ones will look like a train-wreck (particularly if I use lumpy raspberry jam again - there were some really unattractive blobs in these that looked like blood clots...) but I'm going rest on my laurels at the moment. I may have macaroon mix in my hair, on my glasses and down my jumper, but I'm off to don a white wife-beater and yippee-ki-yay myself with an AK-47 around some hostage situations.

That photogenic brown sludge is actually a chocolate pot. This is a deconstructed Café Gourmand

**** How many asterisks do you put into F**k? F*ck? F***? Oh, sod it, 'Fuck' will do fine.