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So, while watching one of my French Cooking at Home episodes (... I like European things) she made an Almond Meringue Cake. Boy, did it look easy. I can make meringue! Sure, I've never done it before, but surely whipping sugar into egg whites can't be hard. -_-
It's two layers of piped meringue in circles, home-made butter cream and thinly (perfectly) sliced peaches in between layers and on top, with sliced almonds all on the sides. Sounds fantastic, looks impressive. I was going to conquer it, it'd be easy. Got out my ingredients and began.
The Meringue... So separating my yolks and whites was fairly easy, step one done. Now to whip them to soft peaks, which I did, add two table spoons of sugar, which I did, and whip to stiff peaks... which I did not. I took what seemed like ten minutes to whip them (with an electric mixer, mind you, she only used her hand and a whisk on the show!! O_o ) and they were ever so slightly more stiff than they had been at "soft peak" stage. Well, I figured I'll just keep beating and beating because I just know that I've seen how stiff they can get their meringue on TV! My Mamaw comes in to see how I'm doing (because she can't believe I've been mixing with our really noisy mixer all this time) and mentions that if you beat egg whites too long, then they'll go flat again. -_- Are you serious? Hence, the seed of doubt was planted in my ever-so-confident mind. Surely I had not beat these egg whites past the point of stiff peaks without realizing it and then got back to soft peaks till Kingdom come? So now that I was afraid, I figured I'd stop while I was ahead and left them at the "barely more than soft-peak" stage to mix in my ground almonds concoction. Instead of piping out of my plastic bag (with the corner cut off) like lovely icing as it looked on the show, it oozed out quickly in a big glob and I quickly swirled it to make the filled in circle "layers" of what was to be my cake. The baking sheets went in the oven for the allotted amount of time (which seemed kind of long, but I didn't question it... let me advise, while baking and cooking in general, to USE COMMON SENSE!). I was going to happily forget about it until my timer told me it was beautiful. *snort of derision at said timer*
The Butter Cream... Well, I figured the butter cream would be a much needed break from tentatively whipping something, so this was going to be great. I was instructed to make a simple syrup, sugar and water, and boil it until it came to "soft ball" stage (which my recipe explained was "just before the liquid would change color"). I'm confident. So it's boiling perfectly, not raging, I'm stirring gently every now and then. Still confident. It's boiling, it's boiling... still boiling. Reducing a little. Confident. Nothing out of the ordinary is happening, by now I'm kind of hoping that something out of the ordinary would happen, like say, my syrup barely starting to get color. But it's not. I'm looking at it and looking at it, practically staring it down, willing it to start turning color so I can take it off the heat and get my butter cream of awesomeness started. My eyes start cheating me, "is that a little yellow? Is it finally starting to change?" I call in for a second opinion, Mamaw comes in, she says it's probably perfect for what I had explained to her I was looking for, since it's still clear. Okay! We're good. Sigh of relief and I've made the delicious butter cream that is so full of butter that I almost can't believe it. There is no mistaking the title of this icing. Done.The Meringue... again... The meringue is still in the oven, I've dared a peak at it and it's a little saggy from what it was when I first put it in. :'/ It still has like a half hour in there, so I pray, and I turn the light off in the oven so that I don't tempt myself to keep peaking at it and worrying. To take my mind off, I start slicing my beautiful strawberries. Yes, you heard me right earlier, I had said peaches. Well the first grocery store we went to did not have peaches in, I was resourceful, I saw beautiful strawberries as an alternative. I was adapting and determined that it would be delicious. The next store we went to had peaches. TOO LATE! I had made my mind up on strawberries, so I cast the peaches to the winds (the winds of my mind... I didn't throw peaches... I don't waste ;) ha ha). So the gorgeous strawberries were sliced and ready to make my two layered cake beautiful and radiant and full of joy. Time passes. Mamaw goes to look at my meringue (with 20 minutes to go) and says,
"Codi this is done." The way she says it begs one to think it's a little more than done. I'm nervous. It comes out and it's a bit on the brown side of "golden brown." It's okay, I can handle it, I'll just take it up before it gets too cool and hard. I should have bought parchment paper. The spray and flour I had put on the baking sheets did not work as I'd hoped, and combined with the overly "done" meringues I found myself chiseling for dear life of my dessert. (On the left is a photo of our stove top battle-ground after the epic "scraping of the meringue" episode of my life.) The once-thought lovely meringue layers that had been forged were now disintegrated aside from two large-ish pieces about the size of my palms. I could not make my cake out of this.I was in mourning of my dessert when Mamaw came up, bit off a piece of the meringue fiasco and said, "Now Codi, it's still good. We will fix this!" Out came a pie plate, all the crumbles were piled in "evenly" and I was instructed to put the butter cream on top, sprinkle with the almonds, and arrange my strawberries. So I did.
And, aside from occasional globs of only butter cream (which is a bit much to handle), it was good. I will need a while to recover before I attempt this recipe again... and SUCCEED! The end.
- Codi Lyn -
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