If you’re anything like us, you often find yourself in the position of having too many egg whites on hand. This is due entirely to Jon’s tendency to make fabulous homemade ice cream, full of cream and egg yolks, plus our extreme dislike of scrambled egg whites (I’ve tried adding a bit of extra white to regular scrambled eggs, and I’m not crazy about that either). What to do with all those egg whites? It finally occurred to me to start making meringue.

The main way I’ve seen baked meringue is as a pavlova, or the big messy pillows that French bakeries all seem to have piled up in their windows. I wanted a small, bite-sized cookie, so I hunted around and found some recipes to try. The first batch I made, I just spooned out the batter in lumps like drop biscuits, and didn’t bake them quite long enough. They were delicious but very sticky. This last time, I used a piping tube to make evenly sized dollops, then baked them very slowly for two hours and gave them an extra hour in the oven to dry out. They were perfect – crispy to bite into, then melting away. Not to mention adorable. The few remaining cookies that sat out overnight began to get a bit soft, so they were like slightly stale marshmallows – which was kind of wonderful. Continue reading →