Macaroons or Macarons?

First: I did end up finding a new whisk attachment for my ancient mixer.  I cannot wait for it to come in.  In the meantime, I borrowed Betsy's.  Thank you Bets!  Come on over for some macaroons as payment ;)


Today, after hearing my mother vehemently swearing because she forgot to tell my sister to pick her up some coconut macaroons from Gerrardo's,  I decided that I would make her some!  When I Googled a recipe, I found quite a confusing mix of recipes.  Apparently there are macaroons,  and there are macarons.  The macaroons that I was looking for are made mostly of coconut, sometimes dipped in chocolate, and are white.  The macarons that I was finding (and sometimes spelled macaroons, to double my confusion) look like mini sandwich cookies and are many different colors.   Apparently, they both start off with egg whites and sugar, but differ from there.  So, if you areas confused as I was, here is what I found out by researching the macaroon/macaron quandry (thank you thekitchn.com!) :

Macaroons:

THESE are macaroons!

These are the easier cookie.  Once you have your meringue, you fold in sweetened coconut, and drop tablespoons onto a cookie sheet.  Once they are cooked, you can dip them in chocolate if you so choose.  They are cripsy on the outside and chewy on the inside.

Macarons:
Once you have a meringue, you fold in confectionary sugar and ground almonds.  The batter is very fluid and gets piped onto a cookie sheet.  A buttercream frosting must be made, and you use that to sandwich two cookies together.

A bit poopy-looking, but delicious!

Now that that is all cleared up, I was making macaroons today (although macarons definitely intrigue me... ).  They were shockingly easy and quick, and come out great.  The only bad part was Mom insisting that she needed them to be dipped in chocolate, which I did not have.  I was wearing sweatpants and fluffy slippers and was not looking forward to going out, but she was begging.  She came up with the idea of melting a Lindt chocolate bar (for some reason, we have a huge amount of them).  I tried to tell her that you need high-quality chocolate mixed with lots of butter to make a dippable chocolate - I recently read a whole article on this in  my Foot Network magazine - but she insisted, so I tried.  It ended up looking a little bit like someone pooped on top of each cookie (after eating hazelnuts... because the candy bar was a chocolate hazelnut one), because as I expected, the chocolate seized up, but hey: if you shut your eyes, they taste amazing!  Why does it seem like I say that all the time?   Oh well! They were a big hit with Mom and her macaroon cravings.

After that, I made an enormous double batch of my good old herbed focaccia for tomorrow's pot luck lunch at work.  We have a professional development day, and I thought homemade bread would be pretty impressive for my coworkers.  Unfortunately, the lunch is the only 45 minutes of the day that I am looking forward to, so I hope the focaccia goes over well!

Giant focaccia bread!  It's almost as big as my pastry board!

Recipes:
Chocolate-dipped coconut macaroons
Herbed focaccia