Leftovers

I'm not keen on waste (who is, its expensive and annoying) so when I found I had 3 large egg-whites left over I thought hmmm what to do with them ?

Meringues was the answer I came up with. Due to my ISP not playing I had to hit the books. Harold McGee knows about egg foams so that's where I went first, I couldn't find the cream of tartar but I did have malic acid to hand. The slightly annoying thing about my whisk is that when you turn it on, it jumps to medium rather than slow. That aside after 5 minutes I had some fluffy meringue, 10 mins after that I'd made a sheet full of passable shapes.

As you can see my oven did it's usual trick of being hotter than expected and singed them slightly. (actually it ruined the other sheet, but that meant I had test pieces for what came next).

When I was younger, the cake shops used to sell 2 large meringue shells glued together with whipped cream and decorate with a glacé cherry and perhaps some angelica.

I thought it was time to give that a bit of a home grown twist. I found some spiced orange chocolate, which I thought would make a good coating and then thought about the centres. Whipped cream lead quite naturally to syllabub. A quick look through various books furnished me with a basic recipe (1 tsp alcohol, juice of 1 citrus fruit 2 Tbsp sugar 250ml cream). I had spare oranges and I thought the carry through from the chocolate would be quite nice. So I whipped up a quick orange syllabub, and added the orange zest as well as the juice.

For an operation in using up leftovers it turned out really well, even after what was quite a filling meal they only lasted moments.

I am worried though that I may have started off on a quest for the perfect meringue, before you know it I'll be buying a copper bowl and a more specialist oven so they turn out perfectly white.