Chocolate-Dipped Coconut Macaroons

These came out soooo nicely! I made two coconut macaroon recipes tonight in order to see the difference between an "egg-white" version and a "sweetened condensed milk" version and this won (taste wise) out of the two! I didn't dip them in chocolate because I don't think they need it! And it reduces the calories significantly. (But I think if you have a chocolate craving just drizzling a bit of dark chocolate on top would be a good idea.)

these are a huge hit....yummy.... and add texture to your cookie tray...

Recipe turned out excellent, I used 4 oz ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate bar. Melted chocolate with 2 tablespoons of butter in heat proof corelle plate set over simmering water in a medium saute pan (it melted fast). Dipped mostly top half of each macaroon and kind of tapped it on the side of a dish to shake off the excess of melted chocolate. You need to stir melted chocolate after dipping couple cookies to keep it smooth. I had about a tablespoon of chocolate left (due to the fact that several macaroons mysteriously disappeared from a cooling rack). I am adding this recipe to my holiday list, will make it every year - its easy, fast and festive looking.

First, the macaroons themselves were so easy to make and really delicious. I got about 28 cookies from the recipe. I did have some problems with the chocolate sauce recipe. The sauce never got thin enough to dip, so I ended up sort of painting the chocolate on the macaroons with a rubber spatula. I also needed about twice the amount of chocolate sauce and I still only had enough for 20 cookies. This could have been because I used chocolate chips to save time, rather than chopping the chocolate myself. Even so, this were delicious and with some tweaking of the chocolate recipe, I'm sure will be perfect.

I made these twice. First I used bakers semi-sweet chocolate. But the chocolate never really firmed up. So then I just melted some Ghiradelli dark chocolate chips with a tsp of canola oil. This worked much better. Either way they taste great. Next time I'll try a little less sugar and more flour since I'm baking at altitude and they're plenty sweet already.