Christmas Macarons

Happy holidays everyone! Sorry for the lack of updates, but as I will be posting in the next couple of days, I've been super busy baking, ice cream churning, and quilting lately! My most favorite holiday baking was done in my super talented friend, Jill's kitchen, where she taught me how to make one of the tastiest cookies I've ever had... a French Macaron! If you've ever attempted to bake these before, you will know how temperamental these cookies are. Everything needs to be measured exactly and the temperature has to be right on, or else you get a cracked cookie. Not a good thing for Macarons. Since it's the holidays, I wanted to go with some red, green, and white sprinkled cookies. We started with the green.

Not only did we put a little powdered food coloring in the dry portion of the mix, but also in the wet portion, of egg whites and sugar.

This gave us a very pretty, saturated green color, perfect for the holidays.

Waiting patiently for the moment of truth. Do our Macaroons have "feet"? Oh yes they did! Those little crinkly bottoms are the feet of the cookie, such an important detail of the perfect Macaroon.

I was squealing with excitement. Really, I was! I mean, look how cute they are..

Next was the red set.

I have to admit, we did end up throwing out a whole tray of red cookies, because the temperature was a bit off and there was some definite cracking. The cookies were still good, just not as pretty as the ones below.

Sitting all pretty, waiting to be frosted.

Next came the white Macarons with sprinkles.

And then some more..

I made a buttery buttercream frosting for the filling of these little guys. Unfortunately, I had little time to photograph these before taking them to 3 separate parties, though, I did get to sneak away a couple of white ones for this photo opp.

Tomorrow, more on Macarons, and another little holiday kitchen adventure...