I've been experimenting with macarons recently, too. They're habit-forming! David Lebovitz has an excellent recipe for a chocolate macarons on his site. Duncan Markham's site (Syrup and Tang) also has an excellent five part article on macarons. He even has suggestions for what to do with shells that don't come out quite right, like crumbling them and making parfaits. (We made a dozen of those last week with a batch that was too thin and didn't form proper feet, they were DEVOURED!) I've been making them with French (uncooked) meringue, I'm planning on trying it with Italian meringue (like the recipe here) next. I've tried making them both with fresh egg whites and with powdered egg whites, the latter are a little less messy and you don't have to figure out what to do with all the egg yolks. (You can also safely eat the left over batter.) However, I've been piping mine rather than using a cookie scoop. I may have to try that. (We even created a template with dozens of properly spaced 1 inch circles on them for piping, I just place it under the parchment paper. I'm probably going to print another one up and have it laminated.) Personally, I'm of the opinion that they're best after about 18 hours of aging in a cool place, to let the filling and the cookie sort of meld into each other. But they don't have a very long shelf life, though that hasn't been a big problem. :-)

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