Hi Internet People,
Yesterday was iZombie Tuesday which means that today is iZombie recipe day. For this week I made something I’d never attempted before, meringues, and of course because it’s iZombie these weren’t just any meringues, they were brain meringues. Try saying that five times fast. I totally did and only got through one before it turned into a tongued tied word jumble. I went to the internet for inspiration instead of cookbooks and actually had been thinking a meringue would be the perfect thing to try for making brains. If you didn’t see them on Twitter last night here’s a quick pic of one of the finished ones.
If you’ve never had a meringue before they are like a really fluffy eggy cookie. Like taking the top of a meringue style pie and throwing it in the oven for extra long. The version I found online called for 1 and a 1/3 cup sugar, 4 egg whites, a pinch of salt, and 1/4 a teaspoon of cream of tartar. To get the right color I added red food coloring, but I still had some on hand from last week. The most expensive thing in this recipe is the cream of tartar, it was almost four dollars for a little container. I didn’t add flavoring, but I would suggest maybe adding vanilla extract or something like that to add a little bit of extra fanciness. Here’s what I used in my recipe.
You’ll also need a medium to large sized mixing bowl, an electric hand mixer, some sort of spoon, and I used toothpicks near the end. I suck at gradually adding ingredients so I put all the sugar and cream of tartar in the mixing bowl and then separated my eggs so that only the egg whites went in the bowl. I saved the egg yolks so that I could use them for something else later. I then started mixing the sugar, cream of tartar, and egg whites on medium speed for what felt like forever.
I honestly think I was whipping between low and high speed for like twenty minutes. You have to wait for the mixture to hold a stiff peak, it needs to look like whipped cream basically. Periodically I would stop and add drops of food coloring until I got the color I wanted in the mixture. I used between about 10 or 12 drops to get a healthy pink color.
This is what that stiff peaks thing should sort of look like, you get little mountains of meringue.
Once you have the necessary peaks then you can start scooping out the meringues. I used a bowl shaped table spoon to help get a rounder shape and dropped the stuff onto aluminum foil covered cookie sheets.
I used my fingers a little to round out the cookies, but you totally don’t have to do that. Then I got my red food coloring and put some in a small bowl and grabbed a toothpick. I used the toothpick to draw random wiggly lines on each of the meringues.
Before they went in the oven this is what they looked like.
You then put them in the oven for 35 minutes at 275 degrees Fahrenheit. Once they were done mine looked like this.
I added some extra food coloring to the one I showed in the upper picture. Next time I would just add more squiggles before I baked them. Some of my meringues did crack and one broke so much that I couldn’t get it off the cookie sheet so they all didn’t come out perfectly.
When I tweeted out the pics of my finished product I was super excited because, ta da!
Rose McIver, yes the wonderful woman who plays Liv in iZombie favorited my tweet. I’m just going to pretend that means these meringues are iZombie approved.
If you try these I’d love to see them! You can tweet at me, @kleffnotes, or comment below. I’ll be on Periscope tonight attempting to make a crime scene tape dress like Liv’s from Zombie Bro at 9 pm est. I hope you can tune in! I’m @kleffnotes there like I am on Twitter. You can also find me on YouTube, I’ll be posting a new video after the Periscope, well after AHS after the Periscope. You can also find me and the wonderful Erica and Erin at The Nerdy Girl Express and you can tweet at us @thenerdygirlexp.
Talk to ya tomorrow,
Katherine
kleffnotes 