CHERRY & ALMOND MERINGUES
chewy meringue, poached cherries, almond custard & vanilla creme fraiche.
Hi folks,
Welcome back to How I Cook, this week we’re making a bloody good dessert.
I’m getting married tomorrow(!) so I thought for this week’s issue I’d make a dessert inspired by the one we’re having on our wedding day. We’ll be devouring pavlova’s covered in summer fruits and vanilla cream, made by the lovely folks from Angela’s & Dory’s. Today’s version is a little different, it’s a combination of two of my favourite sweet flavours of all time. Cherry and almond. The dessert lands somewhere between a bakewell tart and a pavlova and it’s utterly delicious.
I’m going to show you how to master chewy French meringues (they’re naff when they’re too dry), whip up a pourable, chilled almond-infused custard, nail beautifully poached cherries and create an easy vanilla spiked crème fraîche.
I’ve put together a list of some cracking summer recipes from the archive below. We’ve also got the much-anticipated new record from Turnstile and a book about food and sex.
Ciao,
B x
A HANDFUL OF SUNNY RECIPES FOR THIS WEEKEND!
The weather is going to go crazy this week, so roll your sleeves up and get cooking. Here’s a list of some of the more summery recipes from The Recipe Index…
Who doesn’t like a pavlova? I’ve been eating great big mountains of meringue for as long as I can remember. They’re a big, celebratory affair and a complete indulgence. This one is no exception, and I’m throwing almost everything at it - whipped cream, custard, poached fruit… Crowned with a scoop of ice cream, and you’d have a full house.
There are a few things to focus on when making this dessert. We want our meringues to be chewy, our custard to be cold and perfumed with almonds and the cherries poached very gently, glazed with a rich, deep syrup. Get the meringue, cherries and the custard done in advance and when the clock strikes pavlova, all you’ve got to do is whip some cream. Smart not hard people.
FRENCH MERINGUE
What do the French, Swiss and Italian have in common? Good skiing, great tennis players? Yes and these folks have figured out three different ways to combine eggs, sugar and air. What do you get? Meringue!
For today’s recipe, we take on the the easiest of the three, French meringue. It’s the most straightforward as it doesn’t require cooking during aeration. You simply whip together egg whites and sugar until you have a stiff peak and you’re good to go.
The amount of sugar you add to your egg whites will determine the texture of the meringue at the end. The more sugar you add, the thicker the meringue. For example, if you’re whipping whites to add air to a chocolate mousse or a genoise sponge, you’ll use far less sugar than when making a pavlova as you need a much lighter meringue. For pavlova, you’re after double the amount of sugar than your egg whites. The weight of your egg whites isn’t set in stone, for example, two egg whites out of the box might weigh 54g and the next two 59g. Never assume, just get your scale out and weigh them. Double that number, and you’ve got your sugar quantity. Easy.
I bake the meringues for an hour, and only an hour. They’re slid into a hot oven, the temperature is then turned right down and they hang out for 60 minutes. I like the marshmallow-y texture this yields rather than the dry-as-a-bone meringue nests you get at the shops. It makes for a much more luxurious dessert.
A few French meringue tips…
Whip your eggs into a light, frothy foam before sprinkling in the sugar, you want to get a decent dose of air in there at the front end.
Add the sugar slowly, I like to be able to see the little grains cascading off of my spoon.
Whip until the sugar is dissolved! This is really important, to test the meringue is fully whipped, rub a little between your thumb and forefinger
ALMOND CRÈME ANGLAISE
This is a riff on a recipe in my upcoming cookbook. I make an almond custard to stuff into doughnuts along with blueberry jam (woof) and it’s so delicious I had to pour it all over my pavlova too. The custard in the book is thick and wobbly, I use cornflour to give it some body so it doesn’t all run out of the doughnut when you’re tearing into them. For the pavlova, I’m after a thinner, pourable custard called a crème anglaise. This is a combination of milk, double cream and egg yolks, the egg yolks acting as the thickening agent. Making the custard is a simple process, the kicker is making sure you add the warm almonds to the warm milk and cream for a speedy, intense infusion, I also drop in a little almond extract for that marzipan character.