Chocolate Meringues

Only a few ingredients, but a big time investment. These could be made plain, but I added dutch cocoa to choc them up.

This recipe starts with a technique that I've only used to melt chocolate before. I steam heated the egg white, sugar and a little cream of tartar and vanilla over simmering water.

After stirring constantly until it's warmed up and sugar's dissolved, I whipped in the mixer- to stiff peaks, then fold in sifter cocoa powder.



This doesn't sound like a lot of work, but both steps take 10 minutes or so, and then you have to get all of this sticky goo into a piping bag.



Next time I think I'll use my normal parchment piping cone, but since I just bought a piping bag set at Tuesday Morning, I wanted to try it out. It was a big fat mess, then I had to wash it all out afterwards, and couldn't get all the cocoa stains out.

After all the piping, they just go into the over at 175 for 2 hours. Wait 2 hours??? I should have read that part before I started them at 8:30.

2 hours later we had about 3 dozen cute little meringues. I had Scott test one before I brought them into work- I'm not looking forward to his blog post, but hopefully, others will be more accepting of the egg white concoction :)