meringue – Josephine Moon

These meringue bites are so simple (and inexpensive), they’ll become your go-to treat for any last-minute guests dropping in for coffee, or maybe use them as additional birthday party treats.

This is another recipe from The Cake Maker’s Wish. My cake maker, Olivia, gets to have fun creating a wedding cake for a celebrity couple and adds meringues as embellishments to her design, which is another great use for these mini meringues.

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The basic meringue recipe is simple but it’s also flexible as you can change the colour (pink, blue, white, caramel or rainbow unicorn!) or flavour (think vanilla, chocolate, coffee, rose or orange blossom) to suit your taste or needs. Glam them up or keep them simple. They can go as far as your imagination desires.

This one can also be gluten free. (In theory, cream of tartar is gluten free but if you have any concerns about it being processed in the same facility as grains then check with the manufacturer.)

Ingredients

4 egg whites, room temperature… free range, please… I love my chooks 🙂
1 cup of castor sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
Add colours or flavours of your choice (e.g. vanilla, rosewater, orange blossom water, coffee, chocolate powder, strawberry powder, jam etc.). Add these to the desired taste or effect but most flavourings only require about half a teaspoon.

Method

Preheat your oven to 120C.
Beat your egg whites and cream of tartar until they are beginning to hold shape.
Add in your sugar a little at a time, mixing well between additions until the sugar is completely mixed through and the meringue is white, fluffy and holds stiff peaks.
Add your vanilla and/or flavourings or colourings of choice and beat through.
Pipe your mini meringues onto baking trays lined with paper. Bite-sized pieces could be the size of a twenty-cent coin.
Place the trays in the oven and reduce the heat to 90C and bake for around an hour and a half. You want them to cook slowly so that they harden into bites.

Tip

Have fun with these! You could try splitting the meringue into two halves and colouring them differently, then putting both colours into a bag and piping them in a swirl to show both colours.

Rose oil meringue, rose water cream, crystalised rose petals, and non-alcoholic wine with rose water and fresh mint leaves.

Did you know that you can eat rose petals? I went a shamefully long time through life without knowing this or experimenting with the divine loveliness of this flower.

I studied aromatherapy some years ago, as part of a massage qualification. I had to complete a semester-long subject in aromatherapy. Like many people, I didn’t realise what aromatherapy was really all about. It’s name suggests it’s about smelling things. And that’s certainly a big part of it. But it should really be called something like ‘essential oil therapy’. It’s also sometimes now called ‘aromatic medicine’ or as part of ‘botanical medicine’ sitting alongside herbology and naturopathy.

So I walked into that first lecture thinking, gosh, what a waste of time! And I walked out a complete convert, and changed my qualification the very next day to specialise in this amazing healing science.

But I digress. Back to the roses.

Rose essential oil is a wonderous oil, exceptionally complex, with over three hundred chemical compounds, many of which are still unidentified. (Therefore, a synthetic version is not a complete version of rose oil.) It is fantastically healing for all sorts of emotional situations and physical ones too.

I’ve often used rose water (a byproduct of the distillation of rose petals) into cakes, icing and beverages. And this weekend just gone, I wanted to take that a step further and use the actual rose essential oil in baking, as well as rose water, and crystalise some rose petals too.

Although I’d made tea out of fresh rose petals from my garden (while I was writing The Tea Chest), until I made this rose meringue I’d never actually eaten rose petals. They are wonderful. The flavour is so much more intense than I imagined it would be because rose tea (from fresh petals) is actually very subtle. The full-bodied flowers are sensational! I highly recommend them.

(Note: You must not eat roses that have been sprayed with chemicals and that most likely rules out any you buy in the shop. Try farmers’ markets where you can get accurate information about the source of the roses, or do as I did and just take them from your garden!)