This week, Mr M bought a Lego Star Wars AT-ST from eBay. Of course to give accurate feedback he had to build it to make sure all the bits were there….. Yes dear. It’s ok. You can play with your toy if you want to:

That would be him using the electronic copy of the instructions on his iPad rather than “crease the booklet”. Yep. I know.

This morning he finished it:

Meanwhile…. I did some well overdue cleaning of the kitchen, I have been at work a lot this week, then creating a super awesome cross stitch kit, then of course watching the amazing Olympic opening ceremony last night (Go Team GB! Go Queenie! Go amazingly fabulous celebration of Britishness!), has meant that housework has taken a backseat.

What a shame.

However, it can not be avoided forever so I cleaned, and tidied, and washed up, and swept… Then as a treat, thought I would make a mess again by using up the leftover egg whites in my fridge to make Macarons! And for this, I finally got to use my new toy!

My Thermospatula from Lakeland. That I think I have had since… March maybe, when I went to see Lizzie to give her her Triad cake? And it was STILL IN IT’S PACKET! Shameful.

I always have a fear of smashing the glass on my regular thermometer, so was very excited to try it out.

Verdict? Awesome. So easy to read, easy to use, and you can put the spatula part in the dishwasher so that’s always an added bonus!

So I made the Rose and Raspberry Macarons from The Boy Who Bakes (which is a variation on the chocolate and mint recipe from this post), using another long forgotten stashed item:

Red colouring powder instead of gel, hoping for a more intense colour.

Alas not a lot more intense. The end result was still quite pink.

But pink is ok too! P.s. also note how nice and uniform they look! I think my piping is improving, as not only were they nice and round, but also a similar size to each other and everything! Which does make matching them up into pairs much easier!

I did a double(ish) batch as I had 200g of egg white rather than the 120g in the recipe, so filled them half with rose buttercream and raspberry jam, and half with chocolate ganache and jam. Yummy.

A couple of notes on the recipe for the buttercream, the proportions seemed somewhat off, twice the amount of butter as sugar? Really? It tasted somewhat overwhelmingly like butter. I won’t make it again to be honest, I thought I would give it a go, try new things….. I almost may as well have sandwiched them together with butter! Also, they didn’t taste much like rose, but that may have been because I only had rosewater than rose syrup? I guess this may have helped with the overwhelming butter taste too.