Lemon Meringue Celebration Cake

This cake was easier than it looks to make, and a dream to eat - it looks really impressive and trust me, it tastes even better!

The recipe comes from Fiona Cairns’ Birthday Cake book but is also available online here.

 

Making meringues is sometimes a bit hit and miss; I followed Fiona Cairns’ recipe mixing egg whites with icing sugar, which was a first – I normally use caster sugar. Try as I might, I couldn’t get my egg whites to form soft peaks – the mixture was still quite runny. It may have been that there was some grease in the bowl or on my whisk but I thought they were clean – eventually I gave up and decided to make the meringues with caster sugar, which worked fine!
 

 

 

I followed the recipe for making the cake batter and the cake turned out really well. I forget how good crème fraiche can be in a cake – it’s delicious, though you need to be careful about leaving the cake out too long on a hot day (I’d rather not refrigerate cake if I can help it).

 

 

 

I found it tricky to make the almonds around the sides look neat but I still like the effect. With the meringues placed on top this is a pretty cake, and one that looks a bit special without needing to go to a lot of effort with decorations or covering it in fondant. A lovely cake for a birthday or a summer's afternoon tea.

 

 

 

 

 

Chocolate Marbled Easter Meringue Nests

Dr. Oetker came up with some great new recipes this Easter, which you can see on their website here. I liked the look of the tear and share hot cross buns but I didn't really have the time. Instead I made this - I actually thought I'd shared this post over Easter, oops!

Dr. Oetker sent me a selection of their products to try and I was intrigued by the powdered egg white as I don't think I have used that before. It replaces fresh egg white and saves you from ending up with a lot of unused egg yolks if you are making meringue.

I decided to make their chocolate marbled meringues; you can find the recipe on this link. Instead of filling them with fruit I gave them an Easter twist by filling with chopped marshmallows, a couple of Cadbury mini eggs and some whipped cream, and drizzling them with some melted Dr. Oetker Cooks' 72% Extra Dark Chocolate.

The egg white powder was really easy to use - I was worried when I mixed the powder with water as directed that I had left it a little lumpy but the lumps disappeared and it cooked perfectly, and I mean perfectly. The meringues were crispy and chewy in the middle and lifted off the baking paper without problem. They are very sweet so I think the original recipe suggestion of filling them with fresh fruit is a good idea, and I recommend dark chocolate rather than milk chocolate which is sweeter.

I'll definitely use powdered egg white again as I often end up with yolks I don't know what to do with - it costs £1.15 for a pack of 4 sachets from most supermarkets.

Don't you just love glossy meringue?

Marbling with melted chocolate

 

Ready to go in the oven

 

And after two hours of baking

 

 Decorated with marshmallows, mini eggs and topped with whipped cream and melted chocolate

 

Easter Meringue Nest with Passion fruit Coulis and Cadbury Creme Egg

Passion fruit - indeed fruit of any kind - and Cadbury Creme Egg are two things that I wouldn't have thought particularly go together, but I have been proven wrong.


Cadbury sent me several Creme Eggs just in time for Easter, along with four recipes where they have teamed up with the Rinkoff bakery. I already made these mini s'more brownie cupcakes with Cadbury Creme Eggs which were really good, and I mean really good.


On Easter Sunday I had my mother- and father-in-law over for lunch and cooked a delicious roast lamb... plus chicken for my husband as he doesn't eat lamb, and butternut squash for my mother-in-law who is vegetarian. So with all that, I needed an easy dessert!


The Cadbury/Rinkoff recipe for meringue nests with passion fruit coulis and Cadbury Creme Egg was just the thing as I could prepare most of it in advance. This is the recipe - I will explain afterwards a few tweaks I made. The recipe below says it makes eight meringue nests but they would be pretty small I think as I had to double the quantity of ingredients to make eight.


You need:
For the meringue:
2 large egg whites at room temperature
100g caster sugar


For the passion fruit coulis:
250ml passion fruit puree (thaw if frozen)
240g sugar


For the ganache:
5 Cadbury Creme Eggs, melted
100g butter
8 Cadbury Creme Eggs, cut into small pieces


Method
For the meringue:
Pre-heat your oven to 120C. Put the egg whites into a large clean bowl and whisk on a medium speed. Keep whisking until they form stiff peaks.


Add the 100g caster sugar a tablespoon at a time and whisk until combined. The meringue should be nice and glossy.


Line a flat baking tray with greaseproof paper or a non-stick baking sheet. If necessary use a bit of butter to make it stick to the tray.


Place a star nozzle into a piping bag and spoon in the meringue. Start by piping a dot in the centre of your meringue nest then in one continuous motion go around the dot twice to make a bigger circle, then go round again on top of the outer circle to make the sides. Repeat until you've piped all nests.

NB The recipe didn't state the cooking time so this is what worked for me Place the baking sheet into the pre-heated oven and bake for one hour until the meringues are crisp. Remove from the oven and allow to cool before removing from the greaseproof paper and baking sheet.

For the passion fruit coulis:
In a medium-sized saucepan mix the passion fruit and sugar together. Bring to the boil on a medium heat and simmer for 3-5 minutes. Put aside to cool.

For the ganache:

In a saucepan heat up a small amount of water and place a glass bowl on top (like a bain marie). Place 4 Cadbury Creme Eggs (yes I know the ingredients list says 5.... perhaps they expect you to eat one while cooking) and butter in a glass bowl and stir until all the ingredients have melted (this should take approximately four or five minutes). The mixture should have a slight gloss and be quite runny.

Leave to cool for a minute or two. Drizzle the ganache and coulis over the nest and top with broken pieces of Cadbury Creme Egg.

Here are my tweaks:

• I doubled the quantity so each person had two meringues
• I couldn't find my star piping nozzle so the sides of the meringue are smooth, which doesn't look as good
• I actually forgot to build up the sides of the meringues so they are flat which isn't as good either!
• The recipe didn't give a cooking time, I recommend one hour
• Instead of making the fruit coulis, as I couldn't find passion fruit puree, I bought Sainsbury's mango and passion fruit coulis and used that in the recipe
• I layered two meringue nests with passion fruit coulis and Creme Egg ganache, then put half a crushed Creme Egg on top of each portion, so using six Creme Eggs in total.

The chocolate and fruit flavours went together surprisingly well, and I loved the chewy meringue and the smooth chocolate. This made a really good Easter dessert!

Slimming World Lemon Meringue Pie

Lemon meringue pie is delicious but normally quite high in sugar. Anyone wanting a low-sugar version of a lemon meringue pie should take a look at this Slimming World recipe. It uses ready-made shortcrust pastry, so it isn’t entirely diet-friendly, but uses sweetener in place of sugar and doesn’t use any butter in the filling – it uses gelatine instead, which is much lower in calorie.

 

I already had some pastry in the freezer I needed to use up and my husband likes lemon meringue pie (he usually doesn’t like any of the desserts I want to make!) so when I came across this recipe in an old copy of Slimming World magazine it seemed like a great idea. Unfortunately I never get on with using my grill – it’s above eye-level and really hard to keep an eye on it – and I burned the top a bit!

 

Other than that it was fairly easy to make, especially if you are using ready-made pastry, though you do have to allow the filling to set overnight in the fridge. I couldn’t find my baking beans so the bottom did rise up a bit when I blind baked the pastry case but I didn’t mind.

 

 

To make the filling, you boil water with the sweetener until it turns syrupy, then remove from the heat and whisk in the lemon zest and juice and egg yolks. You then cook it in the microwave to set.

 

Stir in the gelatine, allow to dissolve and if you like you can sieve it to remove the zest though I left that in. Allow to cool and pour into the pastry case and leave in the fridge overnight to set.

 

To make the meringue topping, whisk egg whites and sweetener and spoon over the base. Place under a hot grill just for a minute or two until lightly browned on top – be careful not to burn it! I forgot to take any photos after I took it out of the tin, but wanted to share this recipe anyway - this tasted really good, not really any different to a full-sugar lemon meringue pie in my opinion.

 

Eton Mess cupcakes

Last week my friends D and J invited us to their house for a barbecue and to meet their new baby son. It was also J's birthday the following week and the first time we had been to their house since we moved there, so I decided to take some celebratory cupcakes as well as some food to go on the barbecue.

I wanted something a little bit unusual and also quite summery and as I've made some great recipes lately from my Hummingbird Bakery book Home Sweet Home, I had another look and decided their Eton Mess cupcakes sounded great. Eton Mess is a dessert involving strawberries, cream and pieces of meringue, broken up and mixed together.

I was a bit surprised to see the recipe involved making a custard, since that isn't normally part of the dessert. I wasn't going to have a lot of time to make the cakes and the custard part looked like it would take a while, so I decided to leave it out and just make a creamy buttercream instead.

As well as the strawberries that you can see on the top, covered with crushed meringue pieces (bought rather than homemade) there are chopped strawberries and a little bit of cream in the centre of the cake. The cream was my own idea but as I didn't end up actually trying one of these I can't describe what they tasted like - but a few people at the barbecue told me they were extremely good!

You need:
70g butter or margarine, softened
210g self-raising flour
250g caster sugar
1/2 tsp salt
210ml whole milk
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
to decorate:
2 strawberries per cupcake - I got 12 cupcakes out of this recipe
about 50g meringue (which equated to two shop bought meringue nests), crushed
for the buttercream:
125g butter or margarine
250g icing sugar
12 tsp double cream

Preheat oven to 170C and line a muffin tin with paper cases - I used red ones with white polka dots to go with the Eton Mess theme.

Beat the butter, flour, sugar and salt together to form a crumb-like consistency. This is different to the way I normally make cakes but it seemed to work!

In a jug, mix the milk, eggs and vanilla and pour gradually into the crumb mixture, mixing well (an electric whisk is easiest). Mix until you have a smooth batter.

Spoon into the paper cake cases and bake in the preheated oven for 20-25 minutes until the sponge is still bouncy when pressed gently. Leave to cool.

Use a teaspoon to remove a small core from the centre of each cupcake and set aside. Spoon 1 level tsp cream into the hole and fill with a chopped strawberry - you may need a little less than one whole strawberry as you then need to place the core of the cupcake you removed back on top and make it as level as you can.

Mix the butter and the icing to make the buttercream. Using a piping bag and star nozzle pipe swirls onto each cupcake. Top with pieces of meringue and a strawberry sliced in half.

I'm sharing this with Charlotte's Lively Kitchen for the Food Year Linkup, as next week is National Barbecue Week and these cupcakes are great for dessert at a barbecue.

Jareth's Temptation - Peaches, Cream, Meringue and Pomegranate Dessert

Not to be confused with Jansson's Temptation, which is something different entirely - this dessert is inspired by my favourite 80s movie.

Labyrinth came out when I was seven years old and a friend of mine had it on VHS - my family didn't even have a video recorder at that time. I absolutely loved the film, mainly for the songs - the animated characters were on the whole a bit irritating for my liking (anyone else find Hoggle really annoying?) but the idea of the quest to find the baby brother was the sort of thing I couldn't get enough of.

Best of all though were the two leads, Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie. I don't think I even knew who David Bowie was at that point but he was mesmerising (and looking back now, very overtly sexual though I was blissfully ignorant of that sort of thing at the time!).

Connelly was only 16 when she played the role and she was breathtakingly beautiful in her ball gown in the scene where Hoggle has given Sarah (Connelly) a peach, enchanted by Jareth (Bowie) so she will lose her memories and will forget she is looking for her brother. That's probably my favourite scene in the movie.

I decided to make a dessert inspired by that scene, so peaches had to be the main ingredient. I also wanted something that would conjure up the white ballgown that Sarah wore, hence whipped cream and meringue. Finally, I decided the sharpness of pomegranate would cut through in the way that Jareth's intentions behind giving Sarah the peach are malicious - and pomegranate seeds are a symbol of fertility which adds the sexual overtones. All that in a dessert!

The recipe is very simple as I bought a shop-bought meringue due to lack of time. Slice up a fresh peach and drizzle over some honey; grill or roast them until softened and slightly browned. Pile on top of the meringue, top with whipped cream and drizzle with pomegranate molasses and pomegranate seeds as well if desired.

I'm sharing this with Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter she has chosen this month is J. I hope she doesn't mind this entry - I've given it the name of Jareth's Temptation though none of the ingredients actually begin with J! I've been away on holiday and for work for most of this month so this is the best I could do....

 

Vegan Meringue and Pavlova (yes it exists!)

Can you make vegan meringue? Yes you can! I bet you didn’t know that – and I bet you will be surprised by the secret ingredient.

I had a barbecue recently and served up this meringue and cream, and waved it under the nose of my vegan friend… not to tease her, but to tell her that I’d made it for her! The meringue doesn’t contain egg and the cream doesn’t contain cream!

I am ridiculously excited at having found out about this and have been spreading the word; each time I tell someone the main ingredient in the vegan meringue- and the fact that it looks and tastes great – they are amazed.

No, not chickpeas… but the water that is in the tin. It’s called aquafaba and you can read the fascinating story of how people have been looking for egg replacers which work in meringue. It seems to be a relatively recent discovery.

The meringue is really easy to make – just the same as a regular meringue, though the aquafaba did seem to need a bit more whisking than egg whites, so I was very glad of my Kitchenaid stand mixer.

You need:

For the meringue:

liquid from a 400g tin of chickpeas

1 cup caster sugar

1 tbsp arrowroot powder (available in supermarkets in sachets from Dr. Oetker)

1 tsp vanilla flavouring

1 tsp white wine vinegar or cider vinegar

For the cream:

400ml tin coconut milk

Icing sugar to taste

Fresh berries to decorate (optional)

Preheat oven to 140C. Drain the liquid from the tin of chickpeas into a bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer and whisk, starting off at low speed and gradually increasing the speed to high, for several minutes until the liquid foams up and then forms soft peaks, much like whisking egg whites.

Add the sugar and arrowroot powder and mix on medium speed and then high until you have stiff glossy peaks.

Add the vanilla and vinegar and whisk briefly to combine.

Place a piece of greaseproof paper on a flat baking tray and spoon out the ‘meringue’ into a circular shape. Turn the oven down to 120C and bake for 2 – 2.5 hours. Turn the oven off and leave the meringue in the oven to fully cool overnight if you can. At the same time, place the can of coconut milk in the fridge overnight.

The next day, carefully peel the greaseproof paper off the meringue – rather than the other way around – and place on a plate to serve. Mine did break up a little unfortunately!

To make the cream, open the tin of coconut milk – the contents will have separated into a thin water-like liquid and a thick, almost solid, top layer. The tins will often separate in this way even in the cupboard and you can easily mix the two layers together to add to a curry and so on – but for this recipe, you want the solid layer. Carefully spoon it out into a bowl and add icing sugar to taste (add about 3 tbsp initially then taste it). Whisk until you have the consistency of double cream.

Spoon on top of the pavlova and top with fresh berries - I used strawberries and blueberries. And there you have it  - a vegan pavlova!

I'm sending this to Tea Time Treats as they have a theme of summer holiday baking; the strawberries and blueberries make this quite summery and this is a good dessert to have after a BBQ as you can make the meringue in advance then assemble it very quickly. The challenge is hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage and Jane at The Hedgecombers,

I'm also sharing it with the Vegetable Palette challenge, hosted by Shaheen at Allotment 2 Kitchen; the theme is 'more glorious reds' and she accepts fruits as well as veg.

In addition I'm sending this to the Food Year Linkup hosted by Charlottes Lively Kitchen. This would be lovely if you were holding a Breast Cancer Care's Strawberry Tea fundraiser.

 

Mini Lemon Meringue Tarts

I love lemon meringue pie and these tarts are a great little twist – they are bite-sized, quick to make and would be lovely for afternoon tea. I made them when we had friends dropping by a few weekends ago. I used shop-bought lemon curd though you can make your own; for me though the great thing about these are that they are so quick to make.

  

To make about 8, you need:

225g plain flour plus extra for flouring the work surface

110g butter

80g caster sugar

1 egg

8-16 tbsp lemon curd (about half a large jar)

4 egg whites (I used Two Chicks egg white that comes in a carton so I didn’t have yolks to use up)

100g caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 180C.

In a bowl, cream together the flour and butter then work in the caster sugar and egg until you have a dough. Knead on a lightly floured work surface and roll out. Cut out small rounds with a circular cutter, and place in a greased muffin tin. This is the base of the tart; cut a strip of dough and place this around the side of the muffin hole, and press together with the base piece so they are joined. Alternatively if you have a big enough cutter, cut a circle that is large enough to place into the muffin tin so that as well as covering the bottom, it comes up the sides.

Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes depending on the thickness of your pastry. When cool, place 1-2 tbsp lemon curd inside each pastry case.

Beat the egg whites until stiff and gradually add the sugar; continue beating until thick and glossy. Spoon the meringue onto the top of each tart.

You can then either brown these under the grill or use a cook’s blowtorch as I did, to caramelize the top. Allow to cool before eating.

I'm sending these to the Pastry Challenge, hosted by Jen's Food; this month she is looking for pastry-based recipes that are quick to make.

 

I'm also sending them to Treat Petite, hosted by Stuart at Cakeyboi and Kat aka The Baking Explorer, as they are hosting a 'summertime special'.