Confession time. I've never made a meringue before in my life. First task then was to get the various bits and bobs I needed, which first meant looking at a few recipes then getting myself to the shops. Remember that rain I mentioned?
Recipes are all fairly similar. You're basically beating sugar into egg white, with maybe a dash of something to stabilise it, in order to form a sugar/ protein lattice. Apparently. It would appear that you don't want the eggs too fresh, which was ideal for me as the ones I had were about a week old.
Having secured the ingredients and got home the next hurdle turned out to be a lack of kitchen scales which are still consigned to a box somewhere in the Cellar of Doom. I really didn't fancy my chances in finding them and whilst normally I'll wing quantities in recipes as I said, I've not made this before. This means I've not got a clue how sweet, for example, meringue should be at any given stage so I was happy to find a measuring cup. It was around this point I decided to shift from making torte to just knocking up a smaller amount of hazelnut meringue topped with cream and raspberries as more of an experiment.
Enough preamble, let's go for the recipe. I've mostly lifted it from The Dairy Book of Home Cookery, which I've still got to return to my mate Russ after we shared a flat together in the mid 1990s, and then added the hazel nuts at the end.
Ingredients
Two egg whites
Pinch of cream of tartar
Half a cup of caster sugar
Third of cup of (roasted) hazelnuts
Baking parchment paper
Double cream
Raspberries
Put the egg whites and cream of tartar in a mixing bowl and beat it until it starts to get "stiff and peaky". Whisk whisk whisk. Hmm. Begs the question, what is "stiff and peaky"? Taking Viagra with a head cold? Still, it reached a point which I reckoned fitted the description so I moved on to the next step.
Not looking quite stiff and peaky yet I thinkAdd half the sugar and continue whisking until the mix is shiny and "stands in firm peaks".
Add the remaining caster sugar and beat until the meringue is "very stiff and and silky looking and texture is fairly close". Close? Close to what? I actually added the sugar in small batches at this point, seemed like a good idea, don't know why. It was at this point that the handle fell off the whisk.
Whoops.Fold in the hazelnuts.
Spoon onto a baking tray lined with the baking parchment paper, place into a preheated oven on gas mark 2 for twenty minutes, turn the heat off and leave in the oven for another hour.
Ready for the oven As they cooked I made the left over yolks into fresh mayonnaise. Shame that ideally you need fresh yolks for mayo though, which was all a bit of a mismatch. By the way if I get hold of very fresh eggs I always go for poaching where freshness is the key not adding bloody vinegar.
When the bases have come out of the oven and cooled whisk up some cream, smear it over the top and then add the raspberries. Or strawberries, or whatever, or just eat them as they are.
Mint leaves purely for presentation. Sorry.Now, one slight problem here, the tops have risen but the base is a little soggy. Nice but not quite right. Guess I'll just have to whisk harder and longer next time. Maybe it'd be easier to get an electric whisk but quite aside from me being on the dole now, I think it might be the thin end of the wedge. Next thing you know I'd be getting a microwave!
