Thursday 8 January 2009

The best laid plans...

I was polishing my halo last night. Having made the last lot of low-waste festive goodies, for presents at Christmas number 3 this weekend, I had 4 egg whites left over. There are already 4 in the freezer (bit of an experiment, not sure that will work but we'll see) so as the oven was on anyway I figured I'd make meringue.

Over to BBC Good Food for a recipe. Egg whites, sugar, whisk, easy. The meringues even keep well in a tin, or will freeze. Excellent.

I glossed over the instruction "Line 2 baking sheets with Bake-O-Glide non-stick liner or parchment paper (meringue can stick on greaseproof paper and foil)." - I don't have Bake-O-Glide (whatever that might be) or parchment, just good old greaseproof. Besides, I'm standing here with a bowl of meringue mix, it's now 9:30pm, the cooking time is 1h45, and I just need to get on.

Big mistake. I now have a large pavlova-size meringue with a resolutely unpeelable papery bottom. Forget superglue, next time you need to weld something, use egg white and sugar. Bah. I'm going to peel the crunchy bits off the top and save them for a pudding, but everyone knows the gooey middle bits (completely 100% stuck to the paper) are the best. In the bin they go.

So, if there are any other egg white recipes out there, I'd love to hear them. Until I find something less prone to disaster (or invest in some Bake-O-Glide or maybe rice paper), I'm just going to have to find biscuit recipes that don't demand only yolks. Very inconsiderate of chickens not to lay them separately, I say.

No comments:

Post a Comment