On Saturday, I had a baking date with my favorite yellow-obsessed friend, Emily. We’ve been talking about making Meyer lemon macarons since we found this recipe via Pinterest ages ago. So over the weekend we finally did it! It went…okay.

While this was neither my most or least successful baking project—I make a mean brownie and I totally messed up a bundt cake recently, I did learn a lot from this experience. And when Emily and I try again next month, we’ll hopefully have better success.

Here are a few things I learned and will try next time:
1. Sift the almond flour and powdered sugar together. I have a gorgeous sifter—time to use it.
2. Double check that you have all the ingredients AND supplies before starting. We had some downtime post making the batter while Emily’s boyfriend was kind enough to go pick up parchment paper for us. I think that affected the batter.
3. Dyeing sugar with gel food coloring is a bit ridiculous, but it does make for pretty macarons. (See the photo below.)
4. Swiss meringue buttercream is delicious and easy to make. I should make it more often than I do.
5. I need to watch some youtube videos on piping techniques before we try this again. I was TERRIBLE. Anyone have suggestions?

We might have only gotten seven edible cookies and four somewhat photogenic cookies out of this batch, but they were tasty, we learned a lot, and we both were in character with our yellow shoes.