For Alicia's birthday I signed us up for a cooking class at Gygi to make French Macaroons! It was so much fun! I haven't taken a cooking class since I was in 7th grade. Even then we were making stuff like lumberjack casserole. Strange though that in that class I won first place for my bread and then failed miserably with my pie. It's been backwards ever since. Anyways, we made French Macaroons, possibly one of my most favorite cookies ever. They are so amazing. They change my life every time I bite into one. Partly because they cost somewhere around 2-3 dollars each from a fancy bakery and partly because they have the most incredibly crunchy crumbly texture with a mouth watering chewy center that you can't find in anything else no matter how hard to try. There's some mystique about making them and little tricks and such to make them turn out just right so the class was fantastic. We got to make the Strawberry Lemon flavored ones and I must say, I think ours were the best. It was fun being in that big kitchen too. I've been dreaming of that oven and Kitchen Aid mixer ever since. We all got to share the results and take them home. Macaroons are so expensive that I think the class paid for itself in the amount of cookies I came home with. Alicia took some better pictures of the finished product and put up the recipes on her food blog here. I devoured them all and left the next morning for a week in the Tetons.
