Today I’m preparing a special recipe for the weekend, something I’ve never made before and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it will turn out okay. I’m talk about meringues, which are notoriously difficult to get right and take a lot of ward work with a whisk! Luckily, I’ve got my new Russell Hobbs stand mixer to try out and I’m hoping that having a new bit of kitchen kit will make all the difference to my baking.
The Russell Hobbs Aura Hand and Stand Mixer that I’m using combines a hand whisk and a mixer stand, which has a bowl that rotates as the whisk gets to work, so I didn’t even need to do any work to whisk the egg whites into peaks – I just kept an eye on it while I got on with the washing up!
Spoon into a piping bag and pipe rounds onto greaseproof paper – or just dollop on with a spoon if you prefer.
Allow to cool and then whip up some double cream until it’s thick and spreadable, then spread onto the base of one meringue before sandwiching on a second meringue to make a ‘snowball’ shape. You can serve them like this, or with a dusting of icing sugar on top. I’ve decorated my meringues in a few different ways to try out some festive ideas.
The first one (my favourite) was drizzled with icing and then sprinkled with edible glitter – that’s the kind of snowball that Elsa from Frozen would eat, I’m sure! I dipped the top of one snowball into the icing and then added silver balls (very nice for a New Years eve party!) and my final festive decoration was a drizzling of runny icing and a scattering of red, white and greed hundreds and thousands, which looked super-Christmassy.
Overall I was very surprised at how easy it was to make meringues, considering that I’ve avoided baking them my whole life! I think that having a stand mixer helped a lot because I didn’t need to put much effort into the whisking. Seeing as this is usually the most laborious task which is where meringues often go wrong, I was very pleased that the stress has been taken out of the process and now I can imagine making meringues all the time – I’m already thinking about what flavours I could put into my next batch!