My First Attempt at Making French Macarons

Hello lovelies!  I hope that all of my American friends had a most blessed Thanksgiving today!  I had a very wonderful day with my family whom I am so very thankful for!  

I have decided that instead of making another blog for my various baking, cooking and canning adventures that I will, on occasion, share a recipe here!  I actually have three other blogs that I am horrible at keeping up!  So, I'm not going to add another blog to my list of failed blogs.  

For my first entry, I will share my French Macaron adventure!  I blame this adventure on three things:

1.  Katherine Caron-Greig from The Fashionable Past.  She was posting these pictures of macarons that she had been making to Facebook.  Every new post of these fabulous cookies caused me to be more excited than the last post!  I was so very inspired by her as she is a seamstress as well and she could do it!

2.  My Daddy is on a gluten free diet now and I wanted him to be able to enjoy a desert on Thanksgiving.  I chose Pumpkin Macarons so that he could have at least some semblance of pumpking pie on this day!

3.  My cheapness thriftiness..I have had macarons in the past at a pastry shop and paid $1.75 for one...and they didn't even tast that good.  But I love the looks of them!  There's just something very old fashioned about them that makes my Victorian heart happy!  If I can perfect the process, I am so going to be making them!!

So, I began researching Macarons on the internet.  I found some wonderful videos that really helped me out...

Beth's Foolprool French Macaron Recipe

Joy of Baking French Macaron Recipe

These helped me to understand visually how to go about making these cookies.  Then I searched for a recipe that I could make.

Pumpkin French Macarons

I did substitute pumpkin puree for the pumpkin butter and I had no oranges so I didn't add the orange zest.

Macaron Batter piped onto parchment papered cookie sheets resting for 30 minutes

I was very anxious to make these as I had heard how very finicky they can be.  It is a sort of exact science.  My son, Cody ran the meringue part of the process while I ran the dry ingredient part.

Here you can see that most of my cookies cracked.  This, according to the videos, is because I under folded the ingredients.

Cody and I spent 5 hours making 4 batches of cookies.  About half of those cookies turned out good enough to be called Macarons!  You can bet that I will be working a lot on these to get the the way they should look!

Our last batch.  Almost all of our cookies were perfect!!  Success!

Our finished Macarons!  They look perfect and tasted divine!  Just like a pumpkin pie!

 After putting together the last French Macaron cookie, I was filled with a most ridiculous sense of accomplishment!  Like I had just made Macarons for the Queen of England.  Funny, I know, but these little things are so finicky and hard to make that to actually have a bit of success was a bit heady!  I have started a Pinterest page full of different flavors....I can't wait to try one where I can use the blackberries I picked on my parent's farm this fall!  Mmmmm....

Be blessed my friends!  And Happy Thanksgiving!

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