Monstrous Meringue Mayhem

Yet again, a recipe has failed me. I believe it was due to wrong proportions or something like that. I wanted to make beautiful, puffy, light meringues, but instead I ended up with chewy hockey pucks. Not so good. Oh well, at least I had fun doing it. Following this video was the reason for my disaster. This is the record of my failed process.

Ingredients needed to get started:

1. 2 eggs, separated (only need the egg whites)

2. 1 cup caster sugar (this is probably the culprit measurement)

3. Food colouring

4. Cake decorating balls

Step 1: Prepare the oven

Preheat the oven to 100°C on fan bake. It needs to be low & slow for baking meringues.

In the meantime, lay out a sheet of baking paper over an oven tray.

Step 2: Make the batter


Crack two eggs into a mixing bowl, separating the whites for the recipe. You can save the yolks for use another time. It is important that no egg yolk gets mixed with the egg white. Yolk is fat, which will not mix well with the whites, ruining the whole batch. Same goes for any oil or contaminants in the bowl to begin with - make sure you're starting with clean utensils.

Measure out 2/3 cup of caster sugar. After reviewing other videos and recipes, it seems like I have used way too much sugar in my mix, which could be responsible for my failure. It seems like a huge amount of sugar, for a small amount of egg white.

Whisk the egg whites briskly for a minute or two.

Start pouring in the sugar slowly as the egg whites are whisked. You want to incorporate as much air as you can into the mix. Do not overwork the mix, otherwise you may end up with a flop, just like mine. You are aiming for stiff peaks of egg white.

Yep, definitely a flop. There's no saving this now. You will have ugly meringues (if you can even really classify them as one).

In the video, the guy was able to lift the bowl over his head and the stiff peaks of egg white stayed in the bowl. Somehow, I have the feeling mine would not work the same. I'm not brave enough to try though....

Step 3: Decorate!

Separate the batter into as many different bowls as you desire, one for each colour you are making.

Add in the drops of food colouring to each bowl. You can mix them together in one if you feel crazy!

Now FOLD in the food colouring into the batter. Folding in the colour is very important, so that you do not lose any of the air in the mixture by regular mixing. For me, it didn't really matter, as my egg whites looked more like PVA glue than delicate foamy meringue. I tried to get a swirl effect in the batter by not mixing in the food colour completely.

Spoon out the batter onto your baking tray.

Decorate with whatever you desire. For mine, I used cake decorating balls.

Step 4: Bake

Wait patiently over the next hour for the meringues to bake.

Then wait even more. The meringues need another 1 - 2 hours to cool down slowly, otherwise they will end up getting soggy. Mine were a fail from the beginning so I just ate them straight away :P

They were actually not too bad! A tad too sweet, and the texture was slightly wrong, but overall, pretty good. They more resembled cookies than meringues in terms of shape and texture, but were still fine all the same :)

- WeCannotCook