Jolie-Laid

I'm really not a baker, and now it's confirmed: I won't be working at
Ladurée in the new year.
I set about making macarons today, and everything went well up to a certain point. The ingredients are straightforward-spaz-out fare: sugar, nuts, butter, and egg whites. I couldn't find my pastry bag, so I used a Ziplock to pipe little rounds onto the baking sheet. I didn't have parchment paper, so I used foil, thinking they would be easier to remove. In hindsight, I should have just piped them right onto the baking sheet, because it's new and coated with layers of high-tech junk designed just for this purpose.
I should have also baked them longer, but they were in the oven for 11 minutes and starting to look toasty on the edges, and the recipe said they would be "set but not dried out" if I baked them for 12 minutes maximum.
The buttercream filling turned out really well -- just confectioner's sugar, ground almonds, and butter -- nice & fluffy.
But here is what happened next...

The cookies were too soft, and definitely stuck to the foil. No utensil trickery or finesse worked to successfully free them, and so they were just rumpled. I proceeded, and sandwiched the buttercream between them anyway.
(This is why I mostly focus my kitchen activities on one-pot meals.)

Is that the ugliest little macaron you've ever seen? I'll answer that: yes.
Of course, it still tasted really good, so all was not lost. Yet for all of the effort, I thought it might be just as effective to pour this bag of sugar down my throat. These cookies are off the glycemic index chart.

In more successful baking news, last night I made the chocolate-marsala cake from HTBADG, and it turned out just fine. My bro was in town and so we served it up for him, in honor of his upcoming birthday. He loved it, and so did everyone else, so we were all happily chocolate'd.

As for the macarons, I will stick to buying them.