This was dessert when Fussellette came to dinner last week.
Started first with a meringue (my recipe is from The Joy of Cooking, but you can see a chocolate version here).
We plopped on the meringue some raspberry ice cream (see post here, but minus the vinegar). Then we topped it with whipped cream, melted chocolate, and fresh blackberries. Sweet and simple.
Do you know what a dacquoise is? If you don’t, that’s okay. I didn’t either until I made this recipe. Seems it’s a layered dessert made with flavoured meringue alternating with some form of creamy goodness. You can’t really beat that. And the best part? This fancy schmancy dessert is gluten free!
And to be honest, despite the fact that it looks a wee bit finicky, this thing is pretty easy. No harder than baking a cake, I’d say. I wanted to find a fitting use for those beautiful blue fresh eggs that Miss Awesome gave me, so I thought this would work out. And I actually pulled the recipe itself from the Get Crackin’ website. So if the egg farmers think it’s good, it must be good.
So let’s begin.
Separate 4 egg whites from their yolks and bring them to room temperature. Keep the yolks — we have a recipe for those in the next post.
Take a narrow bowl and chuck it in the freezer, along with your beater. We’re going to use this to whip cream later on.
Preheat your oven to 350°F. Pour 1 cup shelled hazelnuts onto a baking sheet. If you want to call them filberts, you can go ahead. To me “filbert” sounds like a euphemism for a bodily function, or another name for giving someone a raspberry. Hazelnuts it is.
Toast the hazelnuts for 8 minutes, shaking the pan gently about halfway through, until the skins start to split and darken. Tip the hazelnuts out onto a clean tea towel. Lower your oven temperature to 325°F so you can bake the meringue once it’s ready.
Wrap your toasty warm nuts up in the towel and rub the nuts vigorously in the towel. Yes, I know it seems weird. Just do it. There, you see? Now you’ve taken off the skins — well, most of them.
And now you can remove your nuts and leave the skin bits behind.
Chuck the hazelnuts in a food processor with 1/4 cup granulated sugar for about 10 seconds or until they’re partially chopped.
Haul out 2 tablespoons of the hazelnut/sugar mix and save that for garnish later on. Continue to process the nuts and the sugar until the nuts are finely chopped, and set that aside for a while.
Line two rectangular baking sheets with parchment paper. On each sheet of paper, draw two 4″x8″ rectangles.
Flip the paper over so the pencil marks are on the bottom. But you should still be able to see them.
Now let’s work on the eggs. With an electric mixer, beat your egg whites until they’re frothy. Then add 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar, and continue to beat until soft peaks form.
Slowly add in 3/4 cup granulated sugar, a little bit at a time, and continue to beat until all the sugar is incorporated and you have reached the stiff peak stage. This is when the meringue is glossy and white, with no distinguishable air bubbles, and the peaks created by your beater can stand up under their own weight.
Gently fold in the finely chopped hazelnuts and sugar.
Spread the meringue on the baking sheets so it fills each of the four rectangles and smooth the tops as much as possible. Bake in your 325-degree oven for 25 minutes, until they are crisp on the outside and golden on the edges. Let them cool on the pans.
While the meringue is baking, you can make your ganache filling.
Chop 5oz dark chocolate and plop it in a heatproof bowl set over barely simmering water, or the top of a double boiler. Add in 1/3 cup whipping cream and cook, stirring, until the chocolate is melted completely and the mixture is smooth and glossy. Remove it from the heat and allow it to cool slightly.
Take your bowl and beater out of the freezer and pour 1 cup whipping cream into the bowl. Look how nice and frosty that beater is.
Whip it into a frenzy.
Gently fold in the melted chocolate until it’s fully combined.
When the meringue is cool to the touch, gently peel it off the parchment paper. Set one rectangle on a serving dish and slather with your newly made ganache.
Add another layer of meringue and repeat the process. alternating layers until you get to the top, which should end with a ganache layer.
Take your reserved chopped hazelnuts and sugar and sprinkle them over the top.
Refrigerate your confection for at least 30 minutes to set, or overnight. Just remember that the longer you keep it, the softer the meringue is going to get. Also, if I were to make this again, I would use slightly more ganache, maybe a cup and a half — I had trouble getting it to spread over the length of the rectangles, and I like to be generous.
Slice like a loaf of bread and serve it up. Crispy, chewy meringue and sweet, silky ganache … my two favourite things!
Happy Birthday Minda!
I love meringues, and they’re something I actually mastered as a young child, though how I had the patience for them I will never know. The sweet, crispy, chewy lightness of the meringue cookies made it worth the wait.
Recently I’ve been looking at alternative forms of meringue, and other methods of making them. I made these amazing chocolate mocha meringues last year around Valentine’s Day but of course I can’t remember where I got the recipe from. Do you remember Kª? Perhaps it was an issue of Every Day Food. Who knows …
In an effort to recreate these magic chocolate tasties (and because I had 8 egg whites left over from my foray into vanilla ice cream [post to follow next Wednesday, stay tuned]), I flipped through The Joy of Cooking (2006) for a new take on the old classic. These ones are from page 741, and I doubled the batch (of course).
Now I’ve mentioned this before, but make sure that your egg whites are at room temperature before you start whipping them. If they are cold you can always warm them up by putting them in a bowl of warm water.
Preheat your oven to 225°F.
Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
In the bowl of a mixer, plop in 1 egg whites, 1 teaspoons vanilla extract, and 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar. 
Whisk ‘em up at high speed, and add, gradually, 2/3 cup granulated sugar. 
When you get to the stiff peak stage, you’re done.
Sift together 2/3 cup icing sugar with 3 tablespoons cocoa powder and fold it into the beaten mixture as well.
If it’s still a little swirly, that’s okay.
Spoon the mixture onto the parchment and shape it however you wish.
I had enough leftover for a large meringue to make into a sort of pavlova.
Bake it for 1 1/2 to 2 hours (seriously). You can see if it’s done if you can remove a meringue from the parchment without it breaking.
Turn off your oven and prop the door open a bit with a wooden spoon. Leave it like that for an hour or so (again with the waiting). The trick with good crisp meringue is to let it cool slowly. 
Store the meringues in an airtight container or wrap them tightly for up to three days.
For my little pavlova, I cut up some fruit for the top: raspberries, strawberries, and grapes.
Then I melted some chocolate in a double boiler.
Plopped the berries on the meringue.
Drizzled the chocolate on top. It’s pretty much a pavlova, minus the whipped cream.
Angel food is one of my favourite cakes, always has been, even since I was a child. My mother would rarely make it because without a stand mixer it’s kind of a pain in the ass. With my lovely Kitchenaid this whole shebang is a breeze.
This is one recipe where I follow the rules to the letter. You really can’t mess with the science of this cake. Angel food is basically an enormous meringue with flour and sugar suspended in it, so you have to be pretty rigid with how you make it. You also absolutely NEED a tube pan or bundt pan to make angel food cake. The batter won’t cook evenly without that empty space in the middle. Trust me, I’ve tried it. Bad things happen. Tube pans are generally better to use than bundt pans simply because the tube on the pan is generally taller than the rest of the pan to allow you to invert it, or the pan comes with legs on the top that let you do the same thing.
I got this recipe a few years ago from Cooking for Engineers, and I think it’s fantastic. It’s a good way to fancy up an easy cake. The only change I made to this recipe was to double the amount of stewed strawberries, as the last time I made it I didn’t feel like I had enough.
Preheat your oven to 375°F.
In a bowl, whisk together 1 1/2 cups cake flour or all purpose flour and 1/3 cup granulated sugar. Then sift that stuff together with a sifter. I like the handheld squeezy sifters because they make my life easier and they’re fun. You want to sift your solids a couple times to make sure the sugar and flour are fully incorporated.
Now you need the whites of 12 eggs (about 1 1/2 cups). You can either separate them yourself or buy them in a carton – the choice is yours. Just make sure that if you separate them yourself you don’t get any yolks mixed in with the whites – whites don’t get all that fluffy when there is fat mixed in. We’ll figure out something to do with the yolks another time, but until then you can wrap them tightly and put them in the freezer. Bring the whites to room temperature. You can do this quickly by putting the bowl of whites inside another bowl of warm water. Room temperature whites will make a bigger foam than cold whites. FACT.
Put your whites in your mixer and let ‘er rip. When the whites begin to look frothy, add in 1/4 tsp salt and 1 1/2 tsp cream of tartar.
When the whites have formed soft peaks, whisk in 1 1/2 tsp vanilla and then whisk in 1 1/3 cups granulated sugar, a little bit at a time.
Soft peaked meringue
When the whites have formed stiff peaks (ones that don’t droop), stop yer mixin’ and take the bowl out the mixer.
Stiff peaked meringue
Sift the flour mixture onto a thin layer on top of the whites, a bit at a time, and fold in gently with a wide spatula. Be very gentle so you don’t disturb the millions of little bubbles. Keep adding layers of flour until you’re out of stuff to sift, and keep folding until it’s all in there.
Fold gently - don't disturb the foam!
Gently scoop the mixture into a spotlessly clean and un-greased tube pan (grease + meringues = not so good). Level the top with a spatula and ease it into the oven for 35 minutes, until the top is a lovely golden brown.
Remove the cake from the oven and immediately invert the pan. I like the old wine bottle trick, where you invert the pan and stand it on the neck of a full bottle of wine. Inverting the pan prevents the very fragile cake from collapsing on itself as it cools, and putting it on a wine bottle allows for sufficient air flow underneath to speed the cooling process. Don’t touch the cake for a couple of hours until it is completely cool. Not to fret – the cake will not fall out on its own – you didn’t grease the pan, remember?
The old wine bottle trick
While the cake is baking/cooling, you can make your strawberry goo. You can also do this the day before, which is handy if you’re having a dinner party.
In a pot, combine 1/3 cup granulated sugar, 1/2 cup water, 1 tbsp lemon juice, and 8 oz frozen strawberries. Now, the last time I made this recipe I didn’t have enough strawberries, so I decided to up the amount. Therefore, I dumped in an entire package of frozen strawberries, which was 600g, or about 21 oz. This was a goodly amount for my purposes, but it does end up leaving you with a lot of extra glaze. I froze my extra glaze for some invention at a later date.
Anyway, stir your pot mixture to dissolve the sugar while you bring it to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook for about ten minutes. I don’t recommend covering the pot and walking away. Bad things happen. My house still smells like burnt sugar. Keep an eye on that sucker.
The strawberries should be super gooshy at this point. Remove the pot from the heat and strain your solids from your liquids by pouring the mixture through a sieve into a measuring cup. Make sure to get as much liquid as possible from your solids and set them aside.
Mmmmetric . . .
Return the liquid to the pot and bring it to a simmer again. Whisk 1 tbsp corn starch into 3 tbsp water and pour the suspension into the syrup. Bring the syrup to a boil again, stirring often. This will activate the starch and cause the syrup to thicken. When it does, remove it from the heat. Set the syrup aside to cool, then refrigerate for a while until cold.
Cooling the goo.
Now back to the cake. Once it is completely cool you can set it upright again. Run a thin knife between the cake and the pan to loosen it. Make sure to run the knife around the tube as well. If your tube pan has a separating bottom, you can now just lift out the bottom panel and run your knife around that to free the cake. If not, jimmying the knife around and jiggling the cake itself generally helps to get it out of the pan.
Knife that sucker.
Put the cake on a clean surface, and using a long serrated knife, cut the cake equally in half horizontally. Try to keep your lines straight.
Cut it in half horizontally.
Remove the top half of the cake and set it aside. In the bottom half, use a spoon or your fingers to scoop a shallow trough in the cake all the way around, like a wee moat. You can eat the bits that you scoop out, mmmm. Fill the moat with your strawberry solids, all the way around.
Fill the trough with solid goo. I mean strawberries.
Put the top half of the cake back on and pretend that you never cut it at all.
Take your chilled glaze and, using a spatula, silicone brush, spoon, or whatever is easiest, coat the entire cake, even in the little hole, with the glaze.
Blazing Glaze!
Put the glazed cake aside until you are ready to serve it. A little bit of time also allows the glaze to set a bit. Right before serving, whip yourself up some cream, about 1 1/2 to 2 cups whipping cream, with 1 tbsp granulated sugar and 1 tsp vanilla. Over-whip the cream a bit so it’s stiffer and maintains its shape.
Slather the whipped cream all over the cake, even in the hole in the middle, until it’s evenly covered. You can go for the smooth-looking approach by using a long knife, or you can go crazy with whorls and cowlicks and whatever. I like to dump about 2-3 cups of fresh sliced strawberries all over the top and into the hole before serving. Oh man, oh man . . .
Slather with whipped cream and strawberries right before serving.
Cover left-over cake (hah, as if that’s even possible) with plastic wrap and refrigerate for up to a week, if it lasts that long.
Wrap the cake with plastic wrap and it will keep for a few days, though it will sag a bit.
