how not to make macarons

the perfect macaron diagram from Serious Eats

"hahaha!", I said to myself after accepting the challenge to make macarons, "how hard can it be?"

In my mind, when it comes to baking, I am fully capable of doing anything - and regardless of the fact I've never made macarons before, I still expected them to look something like these:

{sprinkly macarons} {macaron circle} {hello kitty macaron}

I got all my ingredients together and decided to document the entire thing - then blog about it, naturally - though that was before it all went horribly wrong...

~~~~~

weighing stuff and making a wee bit of a mess;
boiling the sugar and water to 110°C to make syrup;
whisking the syrup with beaten egg whites to make the meringuey mixture*
*try not to eat too much of this, it has raw egg in it, I realised afterwards.

It was all going fine until I tried to make the almond mix into a "paste" - one egg white added to almonds and icing sugar does not a paste make.

It was downhill from then onwards.

a paste this has not become;
perhaps it'll be better once it's in a piping bag...
no - it does not want to pipe, and I don't blame it.

Wanna see the final "product"?

Now these might look utterly rubbish, but man do they taste goooooood!

I just need to learn how to make the mixture smooth instead of sandy and jaggy-edged and wrong-looking... I think it was in the timings and the fact that I didn't mix it as well as I could have done to smooth it out - but taste-wise, I did good!

Yippee! Almost success is better than complete failure!