mmm macaroons!

so we had an italian meal here on saturday night with a crowd of friends round. I wanted to make a recipe that i recently saw on tv... french macaroons (see the recipe on the bbc website). They recommended that you add food colouring and it struck me that they would suit the italian flag very well, being that you have to fill the centre with cream...which would be white.

I may have over-done the food colouring a little bit, these look quite eNumber-tastic.....but it had to be red, and if i used less colour, we would've had a green, white and pink flag!
They were a bit of a pain to make, there's lots of silly steps like weighing out exact amounts of egg white...and you have to add the sugar in syrup form so it needs to be dissolved and boiled etc...
But they worked out quite well at the end. They were surprisingly light and not too sweet.
so i do actually recommend making them, only you may want to pipe them out into little neat shapes...i sortof went natural and just spooned it out and they do look a bit home-made. Or maybe that is the crazy neon colour! lol!