Orange zested macarons with 'pink'

I’m going to take a shot in the dark- if you’ve arrived here, it is almost certainly not your first baking blog read.

And if it is, you might want to jog right past and savour the real delights out here on this world wide web of ours before you come back here again. Because you see, there’s so much more out there; exquisite camera skills, original recipes and the sort of sharp and witty rapport I so love to read and so struggle to recreate.  

The prettiest and best matched up of the bunch. What a looker!

This is more what you might term an Ugly Duckling of the blogging world. It’s very young and it still has stabilisers on. I don’t have a lovely SLR, or the skills to use one, or a KitchenAid mixer. I don’t even have icing bags, or a rolling pin. For me, that’s ok- although sometime it’s pretty hard to tame the green eyed monster when I eye up some of the (beautifully photographed) creations of my contempories. 

Not that I’m a giddy fangirl for all the greats of the food blogging world- David Leibovitz, for example,  seems to have reached demi-god status with his ice creams and the suchlike, but his style of writing and tone leaves me utterly, utterly cold. No thanks. 

And even Orangette, who I read without fail for her simple-to-recreate delicious food, has of late lost a bit of the sparkle (for me, anyway). I find myself scrolling down over pages of her prose to get at the food, which is surely not quite the point. 

Before you think I’ve gone totally grouchy, there’s still a good 15 or so blogs I read and read again, even if I’m not after a particular recipe.  David Leite would be one example, Tartelette another.

And, because this is not your first blog read, I’m sure you’ll know that macarons are very much the thing to do here in the blogging world.. I had no idea until I started reading one post after another about their finickyness (not a word), charm (definitely a word) and sheer loveability (possibly a word).

Look! The one at the front worked- no sticking at all there!

And, well, I’m certainly not one to let a foodie craze pass me by without even ruffling my hair a little. I had to wait a little while because, being in Wrexham with none of my usual kitchen doodahs meant facing several hours of fork-whisking which, oddly enough, didn’t thrill. But freezing the whites for transport back to my regular kitchen solved the appliance problem as well as ‘ageing’ the whites for me. Lovely. 

I can’t pretend it went flawlessly. My makeshift plastic bag piping fiasco might have had more success if we had any plastic bags larger than my palm, and adding colouring far too late meant I was left with a fairly mottled macaron. But I think they’re just wonderful. And they have feet! Trust me; there is nothing more likely to get you strange looks than doing a small dance singing about feet on your macarons in a house full of non-bakers. Especially non bakers expecting shredded coconut macaroons to materialise out of the pink meringue and orange zest mess all over the counters (alright, my face too- it tasted pretty good).

The macarons were a mixed bag- they reminded me of when supermarkets sell off the ugly or misshapen bits for cheap. My piping mishaps meant they were all different shapes and sizes, and therefore cooked to totally different degrees. They were done to crisp perfection, or had sticky bottoms that stayed remorselessly stuck to the baking sheet depending on size, or oven position, or some other mysterious factor.And the weird blobs of super-coloured macaron remind me of raspberry jam, somehow mixed into the dough. Which mixed up your head when you bite into it and it tastes of oranges and sugar!
But scraped off the baking sheet and matched up as best I could, they were just fine after a rest overnight in the fridge and slathered in nutella, lemon curd, or a rather tasty rhubard and ginger jam smeared between.

Not gay Paree, but probably not Blackpool either.