Mushroom Meringues

I was planning on making some ghost meringues BUT I soon realized that I didn’t have the chocolate chips for the eyes. So, I put my thinking hat on and I turned them into meringues disguised as mushrooms! I crushed some chocolate blocks to make the dirt, took some mint leaves and used Reese’s Pieces as the pebbles.

Making meringues is pretty simple. You only need 3 ingredients:

2 egg whites
1/4 tsp. cream of tartar
1 sugar

Preheat the oven at 265 degrees (F) for 40 minutes.

Whip the egg whites and cream of tartar together. Gradually add sugar into the mix as you whip the egg whites faster. Keep whipping the egg whites until you get a stiff peak. You can check by lifting your whisk or mixer and see if the egg whites mixture does not droop away from the whisk. It should be able to hold its shape. The mixture will also look a little shiny and opaque.

Once you have the meringue mixture ready, transfer it in a piping bag. It will make it easier to pipe the mixture to look like stems and caps. Line your baking tray with parchment paper before piping the mixture, so that it won’t stick to the tray.

You can pipe the stems by squeezing the piping bag upwards until its about 1.5-2 inches in height. I had different sizes and heights for my mushrooms because I wanted to make it look as realistic as possible. I made the bottom a little wider by swirling it around before piping upwards. You can pipe the cap by swirling the piping bag into 3 layers.

If you want to make the caps a little rounder cut the tip of the piping bag a little bigger. I didn’t do that because I liked the swirl prominent, that’s of course a preference.

Put the tray in the oven for about 40 minutes. Periodically check the meringues to make sure that you avoid some cracks.

Unlike other meringues, I like mine a little chewy inside and so as soon as I can see that the bottom of the meringues browned up, I turned my oven off and left the meringues in there until they are cool.

I love using meringues for the holidays since you can easily change their shape and colour to match your design or the holiday.

Try the recipe and let me know what you think by living a comment below! 🙂