Not quite macarons

I got a new hand mixer this week. I would love (love love love) one of those Kitchenaid standing mixers but since they are stupidly expensive and all of my disposable income these days goes into this money-pit of a house and I don't really need one, I've settled instead for a lovely Kenwood K-mix hand-mixer. It's cream and heavy and very efficient. Despite the fact that I'm currently trying to avoid eating sugar and vast quantities of creamy stuff, I had to make something to test the new beast out. As I had all the ingredients, I thought I'd give macarons a bash. I'm also contemplating taking a macaron 'workshop', but before I fork out cash for learnin', I thought I should try to make them myself a few times.

I have made macarons once before and they were a total, utter fiasco (really - there was nothing at all redeeming about them). I'm given to understand that with this particular French pastry, practice makes perfect, so I thought I'd give it another go. Now, as you might know, there are two very distinct methods when it comes to these pesky wee bites: you can make them 'French-style' which is basically, whip a normal meringue and then fold through the dry ingredients, or you can do an Italian meringue which involves beating a sugar syrup into the meringue and then folding in the dry ingredients. I strongly suspect the latter is the more reliable recipe, but I don't currently have a sugar thermometer so I couldn't try that. Instead, I went with Felicity Cloake's "Perfect Chocolate Macaron" recipe - letting her do all the hard work of recipe trialling.

And, well. They're weird. They look more like chocolate whoopie pies than anything

Pierre Hermé would sell. They're much too big, for a start. And I over-cooked them, so they were oddly hard and crunchy in places. I clearly had the oven too hot, because the surfaces cracked. And they never developed the 'feet' they are meant to do, despite dropping the tray a couple of times and leaving them for about 45 minutes to develop a skin before baking. I'm not certain how to fix that part of the problem. I wonder if I beat the mixture just a couple of turns too much, thus making it a wee bit too runny (and accounting for the spread and the lack of hoofs?). 

Bad pic sorry - it was after 10pm and I wanted to go to bed, not shag around with the camera

Despite their many flaws, they are a vast improvement on my first attempt months ago. And they are really yummy - in fact, Andrew particularly likes them (he's a big pavlova fan, preferring his 'pavs' chewy, so a tiny chocolately mini-pav was right up his street. He's taken the leftovers to work for lunch!).

But I will have to try again. And acquire a sugar thermometer so I can test out the Italian vs French hypothesis.