recipe review | new recipe of the week: raw lemon pie macaroons from the tasty alternative

What do you do when life (or Trader Joe's) hands you a bag of lemons (that you purchased)? 

Well, first, you make lemon curd, because that stuff is straight-up delicious.  After that, the world is your oyster (also good with lemons, actually!).

At a recent Saturday work conference, I was stuck in a mid-morning rut: I didn't eat any of the bagels out at breakfast (paleo win!), but lunch was so far away and I wasn't interested in my own emergency snacks.  Thankfully, my dear friend Marisa's lunchbox had cooler snacks than mine, and I happily ate all of her vegan lemon macaroons.

Since I owe her some cookies and I have to use these lemons somehow, I hit up my best friend Google for some inspiration and found The Tasty Alternative's take on vegan lemon macaroons.

Visit the website for the recipe, but here is what it looked like before, during and after.  I halved the recipe and made everything exactly as called for with one exception.  I had no almond flour on hand, so I went with cashew meal, which is a coarser texture.

before: my food processor didn't dig the halved recipe- make a full version if you have a larger processor.

The hardest part about this recipe was getting my super-hot oven to dehydrate the macaroons without burning them. I had two challenges: one, I made the macaroons a little smaller than the recipe called for, which affects cooking time; and two, my aforementioned oven issues.  An hour on my lowest setting cooked the bottoms a little more than I would have liked, but didn't affect the flavor.






The boss take on this recipe? Delicious and worth another try for sure.  The only change I would make is adding more lemon flavor because of how much I've been loving lemon recently.  I have also come across quite a few recipes calling for a dehydrator recently; perhaps that will be my next kitchen investment.  Otherwise, I'll try to find a better balance of oven temperatures.  

You can see that they're a little more "done" than I would like.
Some of the golden brown color is from the use of cashew meal, but it's also from cooking a little too long.