Pistachio macaroons

I loathe New Year Resolutions and generally don't make them. But this January felt like a good time to make a commitment about my baking. I was going to up the ante. I was going to step out of my cheesecake/spongecake/fairycake comfort zone and start making More Complex Stuff. I love making all my usuals, and goodness knows the fan base for them is an ever expanding one - after all, white cake with white chocolate buttercream topped with edible wafer daisies, what's not to love? But baking has never been about the eating for me. OK maybe it is for a slice or two but the alchemy is what has always drawn me. The amazing way that combining ingredients and creating something that looks beautiful out of them, the chemistry involved, and the skill - aside from walks on the beach or a damn good full body massage I don't think there is any more successful way to beat stress than to bake. I absorb myself in it. I made a chocolate cream pie earlier in the week, my first one, made from a classic American recipe I dug out of the internet, and spent so long staring at the chocolate ganache-like filling as the cocoa, milk, cornflour, vanilla and butter came together that it went just a bit too solid and I had to chuck it out  and start again. No, that is a lie. I didn't chuck it out. The kids ate it. It might have turned into a blancmange but it was still delicious. So. I decided to tackle macaroons. Never made them before. These are things I will happily fork out far too much money for at the posh Macaroon pop up store inside Selfridges because they are things of such beauty, and because they have always seemed beyond my skill. Nigella Lawson has a recipe for pistachio macaroons in one of her earlier cookery books - see, no need to keep running out and buying her latest offering, just recycle her older books! - and I pulled it out and gave it a go. The picture of these macaroons shows them palely green and gleaming on a white cake dish, just three or four, exhorted by Nigella to be eaten as a side dish with coffee. Absolutely, I think, looking at the picture, with a coffee in a really really posh cafe, probably somewhere off the Kings Road. I am Out Of My League. I go to put the book away and then pause. You see, this is what New Year Resolutions are for. I'd have put the book back and fallen back on chocolate chip shortbread had I not remembered that I had set myself a challenge and would be a total wuss if I didn't see it through.  So. I separate eggs, and pull out my fave icing sugar (M&S organic, far less dust in your hair than cruddy mainstream alternatives, and as I have a lot of hair this is a serious consideration). I grind pistachios, which I find buried under 4 abandoned packs of dried split peas. I whip egg white. Gingerly I combine the ingredients, spoon out disc shapes on to my baking tray, and leave them, as instructed, for 10 minutes to form a skin before they go into the oven. Magically, this is exactly what happens. I watch over them as one would watch paint dry. I am utterly fascinated by the process that makes this happen even before they have gone into the oven. Then I put them in and make my pistachio buttercream. Easy peasy, lemon squeazy. Butter, more icing sugar, more ground pistachios, whipped and whipped and whipped. I take my macaroons out. OMG. They. Are. Beautiful. I slather pistachio buttercream on them, sandwich one on top of the other, put them on a white plate. Look at Nigella's picture. Look back at my macaroons. They look the same. I have done it. Macaroons are in fact easy. They are not 5 quid's worth of Selfridges pop up store version. All it needed was two things. A recipe. And sufficient faith in myself. Well maybe a third. That bloody minded determination in my DNA that just will not let me  call it a day.