Chinese New Year Macarons

My favourite part of Chinese New Year as a kid were those hard, chewy-centered strawberry flavoured lollies that looked like red packets.

I used to eat them by the bucket full but these days I can barely get through one!

These macarons are inspired by those lollies - the flavour is strawberry and the gold Chinese characters painted on the red shells represent the shiny red and gold packaging.

After I finished writing the characters on, my mother messaged me to tell me that I used the wrong character for prosperity...but I hope no one will mind once they take a bite!

For the recipe, I used the strawberry macaron recipe here but used red food colouring instead of pink. The gold writing is done using edible gold lacquer.

Happy New Year of the horse, everyone.