I don't even bake cakes let alone little nightmare biscuit things. And I hate meringue so it's not often that I make anything at all similar to it, like a macaron. I think if I can take one thing away from today's cooking experience it is that I am not good at baking. At all. And that I should stick to making meals that don't involve ovens or frying eggplants.

After following the instructions found here it became clear that I had completely over-beaten my mixture. Either that, or my dodgy scales (which are the type that you have to set to zero yourself by moving the casing manually and that jump from zero to 100 grams without hitting anything in between) had failed me entirely. Upon piping the stuff out it would just ooze everywhere and into one another and didn't sit in little 2.5cm circles as it should. Pretty much a nightmare goop. So much so that, in the end, I found myself with this ridiculously large macaron because four shells had melded together while I was piping (it tasted good though - macaron cake!).

I put the shells in the oven and I honestly didn't think they were going to form feet at all so I was surprised when they appeared. But my old fan forced oven seemed to cook only some macarons and not others and the tops became puffy and were easily cracked. I managed to salvage only two good looking macarons (four shells in total) from the batch but continued to pair up the gross looking ones anyway.

Oh yeah, and while the macarons were cooking in the oven I made something that I am capable of cooking! Chocolate ganache! It was a relief to find that I could still break up some chocolate and heat up some cream and end up with a thickened liquid. I would be slightly worried if my aversion to baking were so great I couldn't stir and refrigerate.

Once the ganache was thick enough, I began piping it into the shells and pressing them together, breaking a few in the process. Then I put some blueberries on top to mask the horrible cracking and make them more delicious because hey, who doesn't love blueberries and the only preparation they require is rinsing under a tap.

Voila! Not entirely fantastic looking but they sure do taste great and I have 11 of them remaining so you should come over to my house and have some. If you don't I am likely to end up with diabetes from eating them all, however, my brother is coming home from Thailand tomorrow and I'm sure he will be dying for food that isn't Thai or McDonalds. Ha, who am I kidding?

So yes, raspberry and blueberry macarons with chilli chocolate ganache. Enjoy! The pictures, that is.

And after my failed baking attempts I settled on instant pasta for dinner.

In other news, I am a complete and utter failure every day.