Macaroons the easy way

I caught a bit of Master chef the other week when they were all recreating a dessert dish which featured macaroons. The contestants seemed to be freaking out over the macaroons & most of their results were disastrous in the end too.

Now I have never cooked a macaroon before but have read lots of blogs & they seem to be fairly common so of course I just had to try some myself. I picked out a recipe for Almond & White Chocolate Macaroons from Donna Hay - celebrate issue, read through it & it seemed pretty straight forward to me. Basically it was whisked egg whites with some caster sugar thrown in, then some icing sugar & almond meal folded through. This mixture was dropped onto baking sheets with a teaspoon, left to rest for 10 minutes & then cooked & left to cool on the trays. (Note I finally used both my ovens at the same time, ie I had 4 trays to cook & instead of waiting for one batch to finish until the next got to go in, I cooked them all at the same time, for me this was very exciting indeed!). Once cooled they were filled with a white chocolate & cream mixture. From what I could gather on the tele, their recipe was a hell of a lot more complicated. I was a bit distracted by Chloe who never lets me watch anything properly while she was awake but from what I remember there were bits that had to be brought up to an exact temperature, liquid mixes added to the egg whites which made some of the mixtures too runny & all other sorts of nonsense. I like my recipe much better & they turned out beautiful, with a delicate & thin crisp outer sheel & nice & moist on the inside.

Now that I have made my first batch I am keen to experiment with more recipes & flavour combinations.