Burning Mouth

I've had many distracting things keep me from blogging regularly since I started:

• Work
• Friends
• Travel
• Awesome games on my phone
• Work
• Laziness
• Cats

The compromise is that she's on my gut... otherwise she
insists on being on the keyboard. Even harder to type that way. 

Lately, it's been macarons.


Martha Stewart made me believe I could do it by putting the delightfully beautiful little cookies on the cover of Living. And since there are only like 5 ingredients I figured I couldn't fuck it up.

From http://www.marthastewart.com/318387/french-macaroons

From my kitchen

Fuck you, Martha Stewart. You tell me lies.

I used the recipe from the magazine and after this embarassing failure, I went to her website where the recipe was different. WHAT? 

So I followed THAT recipe and REALLY paid attention. See picture above only not brown (the brown ones are supposed to be chocolate.)

What was extra annoying was that the same day I made the first mess, a FB friend of mine posted a perfect macaron. Her first try. So I texted her and called her an asshole.

She sent me some blogs she'd been reading and I tried again the next weekend. If you're counting, the below is batch #3.

Ummm. who ordered the cookies that look like toy eggs? Was that you? 

So I read some more blogs and pinned pictures of beautiful macarons to Pinterest. Because nothing says conviction like pinning. 

Like this one. 

And this one

And they were all telling me different things. Turn the oven up. Turn the oven down. Quit overbeating the eggs. Are you beating the eggs enough? Don't stir too much. Make sure you stir enough. FUCK YOU, INTERNET. 

My FB friend continued to send me pictures of her perfect macarons. 

I tried chocolate again. 

They looked like two dried turds with creamy turd in between. 

Thus far I had been eating most of my failure... literally. Usually I keep about 10% of my baked goods for myself and take the rest to work because the joy is the process, not the 10lbs gained. But these were ugly and I would not show them to coworkers... But one does not throw away a cookie!

So I tried again the next weekend. And tried to ignore that my tongue felt inexplicably weird and my lips were kind of burny... almost like they were chapped except that my 8000 x a day gloss habit usually preempts chapping. 

And then it happened. Batch #6 was... not un-right. 

Look at that perfect foot!

I sat by the oven and watched them bake up with the perfect foot and the not totally wrong crown. (My issue was oven temp if you care... I had to bake at 285). So I found a pretty plate like a food blogger and shot them, all sandwichy and perfect, and posted it to Facebook. 

And people liked me. And I liked them. 

My tongue and mouth continued to be raw and weird and the internet said I had burning mouth syndrome and/or cancer so I went to the doctor who said nothing helpful except gave me some steroids and that's when I realized the only thing that had changed in the last 4 weeks was my constant eating of macarons. 

So, while I've perfected the macaron, I think I'm allergic to them. Or just to the bag of almond flour I've been using. I'll try grinding my own flour and make them again and see if I end up with mouth-rash. 

Anyway, I've been busy.