cookie calendar - day 8: chocolate macarons

I originally found Sylvia's blog, A Baked Creation, while I was doing research ahead of attempting to make macarons myself. As regular readers of kitchen frolic can probably tell you - I'm a little obsessed with macarons.

You can imagine how excited I was when Sylvia, one of my four "macaron goddess mentors" (see my macaron blog post here about my attempts and how these lovely ladies saved me), agreed to do a guest post for the Cookie Advent Calendar. I must admit I kept my fingers crossed and was ecstatic when Sylvia sent me a macaron recipe for the Calendar! (I know there's a debate whether macarons are cookies or not, but I don't care. It's my calendar so they count!)

watch out kitchen - i'm making macarons!

If you haven't been able to tell from my blog, Twitter and Instagram feeds - I love macarons. A lot. Paul likes them well enough, but I ADORE them. I even managed to talk Suzie (my sister) into giving macarons out as her wedding favours just so I could eat more macarons. LOL. It's gotten to the point where I get upset when I see people mix up the terms "macarons" and "macaroons" (which I also like, but let's be serious, they are not the same thing).

As my love affair with macarons started getting a little more "obsessive", I realized that my wallet really couldn't keep up with my appetite, so I started looking into baking my own.

As a rookie baker, I'm really nervous when recipes are complicated and generally I tend to stick to simple recipes. After reading all over the internet about how difficult and finicky macarons were to make, I was daunted. Hungry, but daunted. In the end though, my hunger for macarons won out and I started looking for recipes and baking tips.

Macarons from Butter Avenue

There are many, many, MANY wonderful blogs posts, cookbooks and internet articles on how to make this beloved little French pastry but there were four blogs that I returned to again and again while doing my research (and mentally psyching myself up for the challenge):

• For flavour inspiration, recipes and delicious photos, I love scrolling through Amy's Food Adventures and Sylvia's A Baked Creation blogs
• For a ton of macaron making info, I relied heavily on Eat. Live. Travel. Write and Bravetart