strawberry-lemonade macarons

For my next batch of macarons, I decided to make a combination of my lemon macarons and my strawberry macarons ... giving me strawberry-lemonade macarons!  Lately I've liked the look of sprinkling macarons with things such as earl grey tea, or cocoa powder, so this time I thought it would be really beautiful to have a sprinkling of strawberries on top.

I've read that macaron shells are very senstivite to moisture, so I decided to use dehydrated strawberries (from Trader Joe's) that I ground up in my food processor.  I sprinkled the strawberry bits on a few of the shells before baking, and thought the color contrast looked really beautiful!

Alas, I hadn't thought about what would happen to those dehydrated strawberries while they baked in the oven.  I had envisioned them a beautiful vivid red color, but ended up with ... dark brown!  At least they didn't taste like burnt strawberries, in fact they were still quite tangy, but they looked more like burnt bacon bits!

It was a good thing I hadn't covered all of them with the strawberry powder.  At least half of them still looked pretty, although plain.  So I brought the plain ones to work to share, and left the ugly ones at home to eat!