Bana-nutella Macarons

My buddy Joyce is a trained pastry chef. I know! I'm so lucky!

She bakes recreationally as opposed to professionally these days, and her specialty is macarons, the delightfully delicate almond meringue sandwich cookies. Making macarons is a different and fun way to experiment with flavor combinations in non-lollipop form, and I recently got hold of a few flavored baking emulsions...

Luckily, Joyce keeps a packed kit on standby for bringing her talents to wherever she's needed. She just grabs a hunk of buttercream from her freezer stash (yes, you read that correctly), and armed with a pair of pastry bags and tips, almond flour, silpat mats, and other goodies, she's ready.

The plan: Banana flavored cookies filled with Nutella buttercream...

Joyce models the Banana baking emulsion... it's more viscous and cloudy than a flavor extract.
Supposedly, emulsions don't "bake out" as readily as extracts. 

I love vibrant colors, so obviously I wanted Electric Yellow
to color the meringue for the cookies!

Joyce pipes like a pro. Because she IS a pro.

I pipe like a doofus. Because I AM a doofus. Well, I'm just inexperienced.
This awkwardness is *after* I switched to using my dominant hand to squeeze the bag. 

We forgot to take pictures of making and piping the
Nutella buttercream, but here's a finished cookie. Yum!

Overall we judged it a mixed success. The cookies tasted good on their own, and the Nutella buttercream tasted good too. In sandwich form, the banana flavor got a little lost next to the Nutella. Letting them hang out overnight in the fridge helped though - I think they tasted more balanced the next day.

Do you have a favorite macaron combination?