These summer berry meringues with vanilla chantilly cream went down a treat in my household! This dessert is so light and is a perfect treat to have on a summers evening.
What you’ll need:
- 100g egg whites (I used 3 egg whites – large eggs)
- 200g caster sugar
- Pink food colouring
- 300ml pot of double cream
- 5 tbsp icing sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- Mixed berries to decorate
- Piping bag and star nozzle
Let’s get started!
1. Pre-heat your oven to 100°C and line two baking sheets with greaseproof paper.
2. In a large bowl, whisk up the egg whites until they begin to get frothy. You want to make sure that the bowl and whisk are completely free from fat otherwise the egg whites will not whisk up!
3. While continuing to whisk the egg whites, add in the caster sugar a little at a time until you’ve used it all up.
4. At this point, the mixture should have turned white in colour and started to expand and firm up.
5. Continue whisking the egg whites until there is little movement when the bowl is tilted to the side and the whisks leave stiff peaks in the meringue mixture.
6. Using a cocktail stick draw lines of food colouring inside your piping bag, so that when the meringue is piped, it’ll pick up the colour. I also pop the nozzle in the bag at this point too and cut the end of the bag once the mixture is inside it.
7. Spoon your meringue mixture into the prepared piping bag and cut of the end, pushing the nozzle to the end of the bag and the meringue mixture down.
8. On the prepared baking sheets, pipe a swirl of meringue starting from the middle and swirling it outwards and then up around the edge creating a small nest shape. I managed to get 5 meringue nests out of the mix.
9. With any leftover mix, you can make little meringue kisses like I did. For these, just pipe a small amount of mix onto the prepared baking sheet using the star nozzle.
10. Once all your meringues have been piped, they can go straight in the oven. I baked the large meringues nests for 2 hours and the small kisses for 45 minutes. Once the timers went off, I turned off the oven and left them to cool in there.
11. As the cream begins to thicken, add in the icing sugar a spoonful at a time, mixing inbetween each addition.
12. Then go ahead and add in the vanilla extract, and whisk together until the cream has thickened and holds its shape.
13. Now for assembly! You can really assemble this dessert any way you like, even turning it into a kind of eton mess if you fancy it. For mine, I decided to pipe the cream onto a meringue nest, scattered with some berries and then topped with one of the small meringue kisses.
If you don’t end up using all of the cream, it will last in an air tight container in the fridge for a couple of days.
And you’re done! If you have a go don’t forget to share your makes with us on Instagram @aboxofbuttons or on Twitter @aBoxofButtons! See you next time!
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