Quick Meringues!

Ingredients

2 x Spare Egg Whites
2oz. Caster Sugar
2oz. Icing Sugar

Pre-heat the oven to 100ºc.

A few pointers first of all. You must use a glass or metal bowl, it needs to be completely grease free. You should use a metal whisk and metal spoons. The spatula can be plastic as most people won’t have a metal one. The reasoning here is that with metal/glass the bubbles stay in better.

Also this recipe is very ad hoc. and was simply cooked because I had some egg white and wanted dessert.

Seeing as, more than likely, you have the egg whites left over from something else you’ve probably got them in a cup. Because of this I’d measure out the sugars into another two cups, once you get used to this you can stop measuring stuff and just have them in two separate cups to add then tip the rest back in the bag.

Pour the egg whites into your bowl and whisk until the whites are white and fluffy.  You should be able to raise peaks with the whisk that don’t flop over.  Add the caster sugar bit by bit (1 or 2 dessert spoons at a time if you have to measure it) whisking each successive lot in.  The mixture should look glossy now and still hold a peak.  You don’t want to over whisk it, this not a real danger if you do it by hand with a ballon whisk like I did.  Now you should add the icing sugar a bit at a time however this time you want to fold in the sugar.  Do this with the spatula, scooping it flat underneath half the mixture and tipping it over onto the rest.  Do this from the other side.  Then you can run the spatular down the middle like a knife and repeat the process.  The idea here is to combine the icing sugar without knocking air out of the mixture.  Just as a note don’t feel you need to add all the icing sugar, if you don’t want to because it won’t mix in or you think you might have knocked too much air out stop.  Do add at least 3/4’s if you can.

Now get your baking tray and line with grease proof paper.  Using one of your two metal spoons get a nice (up to you) dollop of the mixture and use the other spoon to scoop it onto the paper.  I got 5 fist sized meringues from my two egg whites.

Place in the oven for anywhere between 1hr 15mins to 1hr 45mins.  Turn after an hour if they’re going brown unevenly.

I cooked mine for 1hr 15m, they were quite large and finished the cooking time crunchy on the outside and really chewy inside.  I served lightly smashed on top with whipped double cream, another spare from the previous dish, and blueberries.

A quick note about meringues for the curious, you’re not so much cooking them as drying them out.  After I’d grabbed the ones I wanted for dessert I left the others in the oven with the oven turned off.  By tomorrow they should be crunchy all the way through.  It’s up to you how you like your meringue.  They’ll keep in an air tight box for a few weeks I expect.

Two Meringues

Not too bad.  Of course you could make them flatter in which case they’ll get crunchy quicker or mould them with something so they make little cases etc. etc.