I do like a really good moist coconut macaroon. It`s just a shame they are so hard to come by. Plus moist is one of my favourite words - it more or less means "damp" but works on a whole different level... Anyway, I digress.

You get macaroons in the supermarket but they are big, flat things on a bit of rice paper with some chocolate swirls on the top and whilst nice, they are really little more than a soft coconut biscuit.

The best I`ve had came from a deli or supermarket in France and were bigger, fatter and insanely moist in the middle, so much so you`d think they were undercooked (maybe they were?).

Anyway, my quest to find an equally moist British macaroon has ended in failure, so I decided to try making my own. And I was in for a bit of a surprise. You see I`d always imagined macaroons to be cakes with coconut in them, made with flour, eggs, butter, coconut (obviously) and other stuff. But when I looked then up, all the recipes pretty much said whisked egg whites, caster sugar and coconut. At first I put this down to all the recipes being on US sites, so assumed that those weird Americans made coconut meringues (which is essentially what the recipe is) and just called the macaroons. But no, heading to some English sites it seems the recipes was correct, which is even more weird as I`m not a big meringue fan.

Anyway, I went with the flow and made some tonight and what do you know, they worked reasonably well. They certainly tasted right. Not as moist as I`d have liked but I think that can be fixed by a) making them bigger and fatter, b) cooking them for slightly less time and c) replacing half the dessicated cocunut for creamed coconut instead.

Off to the shops tomorrow for some more ingredients and batch number 2!