Macaron Madness

I'm officially making this a disease, and I don't care if no one has ever heard of it.  Here are the symptoms of the madness:

• An inability to sleep at night thinking about powdered sugar and wonder how on earth you could have gone through 6 pounds of it in one week
• Making more than 3 batches of macarons a day
• Somehow think it's the dogs fault when you have over baked your macarons
• Decorating your macarons with candy hearts- just don't do it, it somehow make them look like little cookie hookers - pictures below of me doing it
• Giving your Silpat the stink eye when they (the cookies) stick after baking
• Eating macarons all day, every day and then forcing them down your friends throats

Today, I had this grand idea to make some light pink- baby pink if you will- macarons with a chocolate ganache filling flavored with raspberry extract.  The dog and I were on the hunt for the extract, that being the only thing on earth that I currently don't stock in my pantry, and the raspberry extract gods were not with us today. So I made regular ganache, no biggie.

After I had made a perfect batch of macaron batter I added some pink.  Now I use the gel food colors as to not water down the batter and I put in the perfect amount, it was the pink of baby cheeks, absolutely perfect.  Then they came out of the oven.  Peach.  Does peach scream Valentine's Day to you?  Actually there is only one person I can think of that would still think they are pink, yay color blindness!  Sorry Robert, that was uncalled for.  So what's a girl to do with all these peach cookies?  Why slap some candy hearts on of course. 

Here are the little street walkers now

After all this, I thought why not make a batch of chocolate macarons?  I had never tried adding cocoa powder to the batter, so why not try it now?  My friend has an office bake-off on Monday so I am trying to help him come up with something to bring in.  I also thought I might add some raspberry jam in the middle of the ganache filling since I couldn't find the extract and I LOVE that flavor combination.

I also started playing with painting on colors and adding gold dust after baking

Now that I have finished baking and decorating, I still feel like I have another batch in me.  Screw the laundry. 

-Jenny