Blue Macaroons

Did you know that the French word for Macaroon actually translates roughly to English as: 'Tiny pain in the ass"? Ha ha, no! No, of course it doesn't. But they are a pain in the ass to make. But if you get it right, they taste delicious. I have made them before, but this time I made them with electric scales, these are essential in making a good macaroon. Before when I made them I couldn't quite achieve that light meringue texture, it could have also been recipe I used. This time around I used Lorraine Pascal's recipe..Here.

Things I learned are...you need more food colouring than you think, I must have used about 1 tablespoon or more and their still quite pale. Make sure everything is very dry when you're mixing- water will make the mixture heavy. When you do the melting the sugar bit in the recipe, heat it real slow and put as much water as you need to make all the sugar wet, add more than the recipe says if it doesn't make all the sugar wet- this bit for me was the most annoying. I filled mine with just plain whipped cream, you could make a fancy ganache or flavour the cream if you wanted but plain cream works well as a more refreshing and simple filling as the macaroons themselves are very sweet.

Also, because you will end up with a few egg yolks, a good easy thing to make from them is Lemon Curd! I used Delia's recipe. Instead of using whole eggs I just used the yolks I had left, it seems to work just as well. Lemon curd is basically a kind of lemon custard without milk and with loooads of sugar. But it's easy peasy (lemon squeezy...sorry) and could make a nice christmas present!

They're so pretty and took such an effort to make, I needed to give them their own photoshoot, before scoffing them.