Meringues are a lovely gift to make for friends and are so simple to create. I’m fond of all kinds of egg white and sugar concoctions – meringues, pavlova, vacherin and dacquoise. I sometimes make Italian and Swiss meringue, but unless there’s a real need for a more stable structure, French meringue is the easiest option.
I have always used a recipe from the Australian culinary legend Margaret Fulton, but this time I thought I would try a recipe from another culinary legend from another hemisphere, Mary Berry.
It’s always interesting to try a slightly different approach to our usual recipes, and this recipe I found very successful! The link to Mary’ s original recipe is here.
I wanted my meringues colourful and pretty to look at, so I used rose pink food colouring to create swirls of colour. I scattered some freeze dried raspberry powder over the meringue before baking. With hindsight (which is a wonderful thing), cooking the raspberry powder made it too dark. I think next time I would scatter the powder over the cooked meringues to maintain the vivid raspberry colour.
I’ve called the meringues raspberry twists because of the raspberry pink twists of colour.
Ingredients
3 egg whites
175g caster sugar
A few drops of pink food colouring
A teaspoon or two of freeze dried raspberry powder
Method
Preheat the oven to 120 degrees C fan-forced. Line a large baking sheet or two smaller ones with baking paper.
Put the egg whites into the bowl of an electric mixer. I always use my KitchenAid for meringues.
Whisk on high speed until white and fluffy, like a cloud. Still whisking on maximum speed, gradually add the sugar, a teaspoon at a time, until incorporated and the meringue is stiff and shiny and stands upright on the whisk.
Take a piping bag and attach a large plain nozzle or star tipped nozzle, and using a paint brush or pastry brush, paint stripes of pink food colour inside the bag.
Using the piping bag, pipe the meringue mixture into different sized meringues – some quite large, others smaller, onto the baking sheet. It’s up to you what size you want!
Scatter some freeze dried raspberry powder randomly and artfully over the meringues before baking.
Place in the preheated oven and bake for one hour. Turn off the oven, and leave the meringues in the oven for at least a further 1/2 hour or until dry – longer is better.
Once cool, remove from the baking paper and put on a wire rack until completely cold.
The Quirk and the Cool 