Macaroons!!

Today was a perfect day! First of all because I got to spend it with my best friend, Laura.

Second of all because we made MACAROONS!! Ever since Laura and I tried them a couple of weekends ago at the adorable French café, Papillote, we've wanted to try and make them ourselves and today was the day!

Here is the recipe we followed (we made the chocolate variation with chocolate ganache as the filling).

A few tips we learned from our experience making macaroons:

1. Almond Flour is super expensive (i.e. $12 for one bag) so substitute finely ground almonds instead. We got a small bag of almonds and used my coffee grinder to create our substitute. This was a cheap and easy solution!

2. Make sure you use a sifter with the flour mixture. Ours were not lumpy by any means but a sifter would have gotten rid of the small clumps of the flour mixture as we mixed it with the egg whites.

3. A pastry bag. We used a zip-lock bag with the tip cut off, which was not a complete fail, though a pastry bag would have been much less messy and probably would have resulted in a nicer shape.

4. Parchment paper is a must. Unfortunately we forgot to get parchment paper when we were at the store, so we used cooking spray to keep them from sticking (which didn't really work either).

Pictures :

Whipping the egg whites until peaks are stiff...

Fresh out of the oven...now to let them cool!

Laura put the filling in while I worked on getting the last of them off the cookie sheet.

The final product!

Hooray, we did it!! Now to enjoy our homemade chocolate macaroons!

Now that we've made them once I think we are both confident enough in our macaroon making skills to try some other variations! I'm thinking lemon with raspberry filling might be next! :]