Disaster. Period.

Lately, I've been on a macaron making frenzy.  I thought after the last failed attempt I had a good handle on what I had done wrong so when I went to make the vanilla macarons for the second time I was pretty confident. 

That confidence was met with a fierce B....itch slap in the face as I took these out of the oven:

It wasn't the same cracks as the previous ones.  This time, it was straight out spewing out in all different sides and even exploding on top.

And my personal favorite... 

Almost as if it's sticking its insides out at me like a big fat tongue while taunting, "Ha ha! I fart in your general direction!"   

Ok, well maybe not the farting part.  I try to quote this line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail whenever I get the chance..

Absolutely, NO idea what I did this time.  One thing I did realize I forgot to do was sift the almond meal after running it through the food processor... hhhmmm.. oh yeah, and I may have over cooked the sugar a tad.  Ok, maybe I do know what happened... grrr. 

Also, an utter failure were these cake balls I tried to make.  I've been following Bakerella's blog for a little while now and she specializes in these cake pops.  It sounded simple enough.  They're a lot like Rum Balls a chef at my culinary school used to make which essentially take cake that's crumbled up and mixed with icing/alcohol then rolled into balls.  I also stumbled across The Cake Ball Company which does FANCY cake balls.  They're a trend lately and I wanted to take a crack at it.

I had some red velvet cake left over from the wedding cake I had made so I thought I'd give it a try.  Bakerella has a pretty basic recipe that I more or less followed.  I thought it would be a great idea if there was a thin layer of cream cheese icing around the cake ball before dipping it into the chocolate.  Sounded great in theory.

Without going into too much detail, let's just say it was a great learning experience in making these balls.  There was about one or two that turned out somewhat ok.  The others... I don't even have photos because I was so ashamed of it.  It tasted really good... but presentation sucked up the wazoo.  I may attempt at this again...