Macaron disaster of 2014

Ok, so the title might be a little dramatic. For thanksgiving I decided to make some lemon macarons because my sister loves all things lemon and it was super easy. I put a little lemon zest in the actual macarons and the filling was lemon curd with a circle of white chocolate to keep it from gushing out. They were quite tasty and successful. I bake each year for christmas gifts for the husband to hand out at work. Usually it's easy; caramel corn, quick breads, candied nuts, etc. Since the macarons were so easy to the first time and people are generally impressed by them, I decided to make them for this years gift. Since they were most likely going to sit on peoples desks and not be refrigerated, I decided on chocolate macaron with ganache filling and a gingerbread macaron with a caramel filling. The first batch of chocolate macarons went fine, they were beautiful. I made some caramel with sweetened condensed milk in the oven and it was beautiful. It all started to go downhill with the first batch of gingerbread. The tops cracked and the feet weren't too big so I scrapped them and decided to start again. The day before the husband wanted to hand them out. Ugh. The second batch turned out worse, cracks everywhere and virtually no feet. I moved ahead and made a second batch of chocolate since the yield on the first wasn't enough. I don't even know what happened but they were flat, full of bubbles, just all around terrible. At this point I lost my composure. I wanted to scrap the entire idea but I had spent days on this already. I stepped away, went to the store to get more almonds and came back and tried to be very precise in making the 3rd batch of chocolate. Again, more cracks and minimal feet. I was over it so I assembled and packaged all the macarons and decided to call them "meringue cookies" because it was just downright embarrassing to call them macarons. Lesson learned about being cocky in the kitchen. Also, making sandwich cookies for 15 people means you'll be making too many cookies.