Divine meringues with strawberry cream

Posted by Lisa On August - 26 - 20104,642 views

I collect cookbooks. More then a hundred cookbooks are looking at me from my cupboard in my livingroom. Cookbooks about food from all parts of the world, cookbooks about cakes and pastry and old cookbooks. I even have three copies of one cookbook and everytime I see one, I buy it. It’s one of my favorite books and I buy them because I think everyone should have one and so I can give them as a gift to my vintage cooking friends. Last week I gave one away, this week I allready found a new one.
The book is called ‘Platenkookboek’ from LIFE. Original title is ‘Life Picture Cook Book’. first published in 1958 in the United States and first published in Dutch in 1964.

Second most popular are the TimeLife cookbooks about pastry and sweets. TimeLife books are  have lots of step-by-step instruction pictures.  It makes you think nothing can go wrong when working with these books.  But even I, a woman he cooks for her living, mess up sometimes! Out of this book comes this recipe of meringues.

The picture is also from the book, I like the style! Meringues look so great and chique! Macarons are just a fling, meringues stay forever(and are easier to make!) They look so delicate and innocent, like little clouds. These ones are filled with strawberrycream. Pour in some tea and go!

First a meringue lesson: there are three types of meringue, French, Italian and Swiss.
French is mainly used for simple pastry, like the meringues we will prepare.
Italian meringue is used for decorations and to make fillings more airy. It gets really hard due to the sugarsyrup. Swiss meringue is very thick and stiff, it has exact  the same ingredients as French meringue but the difference is that Swiss meringue is being heated.

If you want to make meringues: it’s easy, but you have to be patient! They need to bake/ dry for 3 to 4 hours.

French meringues filled with strawberrycream.

Preheat oven to 115°C

Ingredients:
For 20 meringues:
4 eggwhites
250 grams castersugar

For strawberrycream:
250 ml  cream
about 5 stawberries

First:
Prepare a baking tray with fatfree paper.  Draw circles with the size of your meringues, about 5 cm.
(Use a glass with a diameter of 5 cm.)

*Whip the eggwhites untill they’re stiff. Sift some sugar over it and beat thoroughly. Beat the sugar in bit by bit, keep whipping until the mixture stands in stiff peaks. (You should be able to turn the bowl upsidedown)

* Now put all your meringue mixture in a pipingbag, use a plain nozzle with a big opening (about 1cm) an draw spirals in the circles you have drawn before. Start outside and work you way to the centre. It should be a little bit higher in the middle. End with a little dot.
Pipe all the meringues.

* Put the meringues in the oven. Go out for a walk, do he dishes, curl your hair, watch tv and come back after three hours to see if th meringues are dry and hard(they should not be brown). If not wait some longer.

* Prepare the strawberry cream, blend the strawberry and sift them to take theseeds out.
Poor the cream  and strawberry sauce in to a bowl and whip it untill it’s stiff.
Set aside in the fridge untill you are going to use it.

* Take the meringue out of the oven and let them cool on a cakerack.

* Fill the meringues: Fill a piping bag with the strawberry cream and pipe the cream with starshaped nozzle on a meringue. Pipe a spiral. Then press another meringue on top.

* Serve!

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