There Meringue cake it is an excellent, easy and delicious semifreddo dessert to be served after a lunch or dinner based on land or sea dishes, or after an aperitif or a pizza with friends. Being a dessert that everyone likes, it can also be proposed as a homemade birthday cake: create original decorations or twist it with color contrasts and, why not, maybe help from your children who will have a lot of fun with you. Let’s see how to prepare the classic meringue cake with the original simple recipe.

Preparation

1

Separate the egg whites from the yolks; in a bowl with high sides, combine the egg whites with the granulated sugar and start the electric mixer for about 10 minutes at maximum speed, until the cream is white and shiny.

2

Add the icing sugar and, with the help of a spatula, gently mix the mixture from bottom to top.

3

Cut a sheet of parchment paper (it must be the same size as the pan) and draw two circles of 15 cm each on it with a pencil.

4

Now take a piping bag, or a pastry syringe with a large, round tip, and fill it with the newly created meringue mixture.

5

Place the parchment paper, just cut, on the tray (the drawn pencil should not be in contact with the cream, so keep it at the bottom). Squeeze the cream inside the pastry bag following the pencil drawing: start from the outside and gradually fill the entire internal surface. To carry out this operation you must take care to stay at a distance of about 0.5 cm and have constant pressure.

6

Create small meringues with the cream that will be left over; these will be used for the filling of the cake or for the final decoration.

7

Place the pan in a preheated static oven for about 3 hours at 110 °. As soon as the meringues are dry and not cooked, take them out of the oven and let them cool. At this point you will have to devote to the cream: put a saucepan over high heat and fill it with water and sugar. Pay attention to the temperature of the syrup which must be 121 ° (carry out this operation with the help of a kitchen thermometer).

8

In the meantime, take another bowl with high sides and whisk the egg yolks with an electric mixer at low speed. As soon as the syrup is ready, pour it slowly along with the yolks.

9

Continue beating the ingredients at high speed; continue until you get a whipped, homogeneous and smooth cream.

10

Take a previously cooled bowl and start whipping the sweetened vegetable cream, which is also pretty cold (if you use fresh whipping cream, add 30 g of icing sugar). The result should be a frothy whipped cream.

11

Get the bowl with the egg yolks and add the whipped cream; mix gently from the bottom up to prevent the latter from disassembling. Be careful to set aside 3 tablespoons of mixture which will be used for the final decoration of the meringue.

12

Now you can take the small cooled meringues and crumble at least 50 g inside the mixture created and mix everything.

13

Retrieve a disc made with the meringue and place it on a serving dish. Pour half of the cream over it and spread it over its entire surface.

14

Place the second disc and cover with the remaining cream (also the sides). Take the remaining meringues for the final decoration of the cake; some will still be crumbled and scattered both above and on the edges, others kept intact. With the spoons of whipped cream kept aside, create tufts on the end of the cake with the pastry bag or with the syringe for sweets with the star spout. Once the job is complete, place the meringue cake in the freezer for at least 8 hours before serving.

Accessories

• Two bowls with high sides

• A small bowl

• Electric hand mixer

• Spatula

• Knife

• Pencil

• Sac a poche (or pastry syringe with a large round tip)

• A round pan

• Small saucepan

• Kitchen thermometer

• Table spoon

• Platter

Tips and tricks

• You can carry on with the preparation of meringues by preparing them even 2 days before and pay attention to their cooking: if they were too cooked they would become dark, but if they were not cooked enough they would be sticky.

• Vary by adding the seasonal fruit of your choice to the meringue cake: with peaches and apricots in summer, or with figs in autumn, you will always get an impeccable result! Or enrich it with fruit in syrup, raspberry jam or with chocolate flakes.

• The secret to obtaining perfect meringues is in the density of the dough: in fact, the same weight of egg whites, granulated sugar and icing sugar must be used.

• As an alternative to whipped cream you can use custard or try filling your meringue cake with a Chantilly cream. And if you have the cream left over, how about trying to stuff a tart with cream and macaroons using this recipe? A shortcrust pastry shell that holds a filling of Chantilly cream on which the amaretti are dipped. A real treat!

• Are there any meringues left over? To keep them crunchy, place them in glass jars that must be placed in dry areas of the house, not very humid and that are not in direct contact with excessive brightness or heat sources.
• Ordinary meringues are often cooked in the form of a tuft; they are then paired, back to back, with whipped cream or chocolate and placed in paper cups. These sweets can be eaten alone, covered with melted chocolate, or used ready-made in the preparation or decoration of other desserts, as in the case of our meringue cake, ice cream cake, mousses and parfaits.
• Meringue cake can also be flavored with the addition of cocoa, caramel, vanilla or lemon drops. You can increase the filling with fresh fruit such as strawberries or cherries, or with the use of lemon; in this regard you can approach the Lemon Curd which is a cream of English origin similar to a pastry cream but with a gelatinous consistency. A very fragrant lemon cream in contrast with the white cloud of the meringue cake.
• If you have some fruit left over, juggle the preparation of the Strawberry tiramisu, ideal in spring, it is a variant of the classic tiramisu of the Italian tradition; without coffee it will be appreciated even by the little ones.

storage

The meringue cake can be kept, wrapped in plastic wrap, in the refrigerator for 2/3 days or in the freezer for 15/20 days inside an airtight food container. Move it to the refrigerator 30 minutes before serving and consume it within 24 hours; do not refreeze the cake once thawed.

History

How was this friable and frothy union between egg white and sugar born? It all began in Meiringen, a city Swiss, around 1700, in the small laboratory of the pastry chef Gasparini (probably of Italian origins), he was then called to the court of the king of Poland. The daughter of the Polish king, who later became the wife of Louis XV, king of France, introduced meringues to the court of Versailles.

The dessert spread rapidly throughout Europe and soon new combinations were born: flavored with cocoa, cinnamon, almonds or accompanied by a soft whipped cream. Queen Marie Antoinette had a real passion for meringues and she loved to prepare them in person! Until the early nineteenth century meringues were formed with a spoon, when Carême, a French cook and writer, had the idea of ​​creating them with the sac à poche in always different forms.

This delicious preparation, known today all over the world (and which in Veneto is called spumiglia), finds application in various preparations for desserts. There are four types of these small sweets: the Italian meringue, the French one, the Swiss meringue and finally the Sardinian one. There is a small difference between Italian-style meringues and those across the Alps: in the French meringuesin fact, there is no step in which the hot sugar syrup is added to the egg whites, to pasteurize them.

Small curiosity: in 1985 in Meiringen, the largest meringue in the world was made, two and a half meters long, one and a half meters wide and 70 centimeters high. To make it, about 2000 eggs, 120 kilos of powdered sugar and 60 liters of whipped cream were needed. Numbers that earned her the inscription in the Guinness Book of Records!