However you spell it, this was an ambitious first attempt at baking these french confections. 

First things first, Andrea and I spent a torturous morning at the Market District collecting ingredients, fighting crowds, and getting overheated. Everything was so easy when it came to deciding on flavors, grinding up the almonds, beating the egg whites, making the batter, filling the bags, squeezing out little circles, tapping out the air bubbles... or so we thought!

The first batch ended up filling the kitchen with smoke, because apparently the oven temperatures are just suggested temps and really you have to play around with different degrees until you don't burn anything. We only did this to one batch, resulting in a pile of cracked, uncooked, and burned little cookies in the trash. We found that my oven around 250 degrees (instead of 350 degrees) worked perfect at about 15 minutes.

Once we had the temperature under control, and the batches were coming out with perfectly baked "frilly foots", we realized that the cookies were completely stuck to the paper. Oops... The book suggested sprinkling water under the paper, but a baking friend said pan spray does the trick! Noted for next time. We were able to salvage about 3/4 of the cookies from each batch.

After all of this commotion, we decided that we were just going to use easy fillings instead of the fillings that were suggested. Who wants to juice lemons and core apples after such a distraught baking session?

Moral of the story: bake only one pan of macaroons at a time, use parchment paper not wax paper, and PAN SPRAY IS ALLOWED!