Mastering Macarons - Attempt One

Travelling around France in 2008 I bought a macaron cookbook.

Two actually. 

Both full of pictures, both full of delicious recipes, both in French. 

But I bought them none the less, because I loved the macarons I'd been sampling throughout France and because I wanted to be able to continue sampling these amazing desserts when I went home, to a city where macarons were mistaken for macaroons.

Then in 2009, before Perth acquired an obsession with these French desserts and before everyone wanted to learn to make them, we took up the challenge, Claire Madeleine and I. As I have since learnt, macarons are difficult to make regardless, but on this occasion, we were cooking from a French recipe, with only Google to translate it for us. We followed the recipe to the letter, though it would have been easier if each of us had been a multi-armed Hindu goddess in our manipulation of the spatula, mixture, mixing bowl and piping bag. Somehow we managed, with the oven soon filled with trays of promising macarons.

They were passable. In the oven they looked pretty enough, but the cooking time wasn't nearly enough resulting in sticky collapsed rounds that needed to be prised off the baking paper.

However, with a liberal scoop of chocolate icecream, or dollop of lemon curd they tasted delicious, and with careful positioning could be made to look delectable... in a rustic sense.