Chocolate-coated coffee meringue

Meringue are cookies that are made using only two main ingredients - egg whites and sugar. Flavouring can be added such as vanilla. I had never tasted meringues and wanted to try them out once. The recipe seemed very simple and easy to make. You need 1/4 cup of fine sugar for every egg white you use. I used 3 egg whites and 3/4 cup of sugar. Normally during baking I measure the sugar and powder it in a blender. That way it is easy while mixing as the sugar gets dissolved quicker.

 Here is what you have to do - first separate 3 egg whites. Powder 3/4 cup sugar as you need super fine sugar. Having an electric mixer is handy because beating egg whites with your hands until stiff is not fun. First beat the egg whites until foamy. Then you add the sugar little by little (not all at a time) and beat well. You have to beat until the egg whites form a stiff peak and the sugar is all dissolved. This is how you do a plain meringue. You can add vanilla for flavour. I decided to use coffee flavour. I added 2 teaspoons of instant coffee powder to the sugar before powdering. If you have a piping bag you can use it to pipe the mixture on to the tray, otherwise you can spoon onto the tray. Baking has to be done at a low temperature for longer duration. I baked them at 100 degree C for 1 hour or so. You know it is done when it comes out easily from the baking sheet.

It came out perfectly well. Now, how was the taste? It wasn't much to my liking. I was not too happy with the coffee flavour and I felt it was too sugary for my taste. May be I should have used the vanilla instead. But my kid liked it. Then I decided to give it a chocolate coating to mask the coffee flavour. Belive me, it was so yum after the chocolate coating.

For the chocolate coating I didn't follow any particular recipe. I just took little milk, around a teaspoon or two of butter, icing sugar and cocoa powder in a saucepan and heated it, stirring continuously until it thickened. Then cooled it and dipped the meringues into this chocolate sauce. But after the chocolate coating the meringues softened up. They weren't crisp any more but I loved the taste of it.

Now there were three egg yolks left and so the next day I made yellow cake which I made for the first time. I will show that at a later post. That's all for now folks. Now I will go and take a short nap.