Time for a Taylor: Macarons

I'm going to visit a friend tomorrow and wanted to take something along that I could eat too. I love making biscuits and cakes, but since I can't eat them because of a gluten intolerance I wanted to bake something that I can eat. I LOVE macarons! I've put off making them because everyone keeps going on about how difficult they are to make. So instead of seeing what exactly is difficult about them I put them in the too hard basket. I decided last week that sometime soon I was going to make them and so when I went grocery shopping last week I made sure to pick up some almond meal. It was supposed to be fine, white almond meal, but they only had the one sort and so I picked that up. Why exactly is it so expensive?

Anyway tonight I got the urge to make them and actually had all the ingredients. I didn't age the egg whites because to be quite honest I'm a little nervous of giving my family salmonella poisoning from leaving egg whites out on the counter in the Australian heat. So I just left the eggs on the counter until they had come to room temperature and then I started to get out some ingredients. I still didn't have a recipe at this point! I frantically googled macarons and started to scan through the recipes looking for one that matched how much icing sugar I had. Isn't that a smart way to choose a recipe. lol I found one eventually and then needed to modify it anyway because I didn't have any cocoa powder. I'm quite surprised that they actually worked! Here's the recipe I used.

I didn't have any flavourings so I just added pink food colouring at the end and the broken and slightly cracked ones tasted delicious. I may have accidently on purpose broken a couple of extras. Whoops. But seriously tasty. I'm now waiting for my dear husband (who's out finishing off go-karts that the scouts made tonight but didn't finish) to buy some cream so that I can make some chocolate ganache to go into the macaroons. You have to leave the completed macarons in the fridge after you put them together overnight and so I don't want to wait until tomorrow to do them. So here I am blogging when I should be sleeping instead.
I think I'm going to try this recipe next time.