Adventures with Macarons: Version 1.0

Last night I was met with heartbreaking defeat pretty much before I was even able to get started making macarons.

The main ingredients for the cookie part of the macaron are the most finicky.
It's surprising because the dry ingredients are simply:

• Almond flour
• Powdered sugar
• Granulated sugar

My disaster began with trying to sift the almond flour. The almond flour that I purchased was from Southern Season. It was called Almond meal flour. I was unable to sift the flour so I followed the instructions in the recipe that I selected and ended up food processing the almond flour to grind it down to a finer level. Unfortunately, the food processing brought out the natural almond oils and made the meal oily and wet. It became dense and impossible to sift. I ended up heating the almond flour at 200 degrees in the oven for 30 minutes in the hopes of drying it off. With fingers crossed, I was sad to see that the heating process did not dry the flour out. 

After looking further, apparently the almond flour should be blanched almond flour. I'm not entirely sure what that is or even where to buy it. Stay tuned folks, I'm hoping that macaron version 2.0 gets through the sifting process at the very least.