Chocolate Pecan Macarons: Kids in the Kitchen

As I've probably mentioned once or twice before, I am a rubbish cook. I never even attempted to bake anything from scratch until my late twenties and even when Bake Off fever first hit Britain, I'd simply watch, shake my head in disbelief that it was possible to create such wonderful creations from basic ingredients and gaze in awe at the TV screen knowing that there was no hope of me even attempting such things.

But as D turned out to be a natural in the kitchen, he has inspired me to have a go at baking things I would never ever have imagined myself baking and around a year or so ago I did in fact attempt to make Macarons. 'Never again!' I declared when I was left with a pile of crumbs that I literally had to scrape off the baking paper.

Half-term came around last week and for the first time in months, D picked up his cookery books and decided that he'd like to bake.....yep, you guessed it...Macarons!!!

I did everything I could to try to dissuade him, even in the recipe book it tells us that GBBO star Martha's most dreaded bake is Macarons and there he was on page 35 of 'The Great British Bake Off Big Book of Baking' that granny had given him for Christmas (yeah - thanks for that Granny) and he was insistent that he wanted to make Chocolate Pecan Macarons.

We got the ingredients ready and he was off.

And to my absolute amazement, he did it! Fabulous tasty Macarons.

If like me you've spent years wondering what the difference is between Macarons and Macaroons (and thinking that they are just saying it wrong on Bake off when they say macaron), then it is in fact that these are macarons, meringue like with a ganache sandwiched between. Macaroons are the chewy often flatter biscuit-like things, (often with dessicated coconut in I think?)

Oh and one last important job...Chef's priveledge is to lick the bowl of course!

Linking up with Kids in the Kitchen after not being able to link up for a while with everything that's been going on with Miss T.