French Macaroons!

After stumbling across this blog post yesterday claiming french macaroons aren't nearly as hard to make as people think they are, I decided to give it a shot, using the base recipe posted (I saved about 8 bucks making my own almond flour in the food processor instead of buying the $13 bag of it at whole foods).

About 3 hours later, I had this box of macaroons. The blog post was right, I guess.. it wasn't really difficult.. it just took FOREVER! I split the batter and icing up to make some variations, from top to bottom:

• Orange colored vanilla cookie with orange extract in the buttercream filling.


• Lavender colored vanilla cookie with cassis liquor in the buttercream filling, bonus small dollop of Trader Joe's boysenberry jam in the middle too!


• Pink cookie flavored with rose water. Champagne flavored buttercream. To make the buttercream, I cooked down 1 cup of Trader Joe's finest $4.99 prosecco until about only 3 tablespoons remained. Let it cool, then whip it into the buttercream.

When I finished, I told myself I'd never make these again, but I keep munching on them. They're good! My favorite is the pink rose/champagne ones. I could probably shave an hour off the cooking time by just making the whole batch that one flavor. Separating everything out and making sure it was all colored and flavored correctly was a big time suck. No wonder my local whole foods sells these things for $3 each!