This past Sunday, Becca and I spent the entire afternoon studying at a coffee shop. I'm talking like 6 hours sitting in the same place covered in text books. So I decided I was justified in breaking for the rest of the evening to bake, and I seduced Becca into joining me.
Goal for the night: Cupcakes with a meringue piped on top and dipped in chocolate to look like a dipped ice cream cone.
I made some cupcakes, but since I only have one cupcake pan, I used the other half of the batter to make a small 6" round (purpose TBD).
As these baked/cooled, Becca and I worked on the meringue. I don't have a whole lot of experience with meringues, and the recipe we chose to use asked for 6 eggs and almost 4 cups of sugar. This seemed absurd, so we halved it (though I forgot to half the lemon juice, making it a very tasty lemon meringue). After double-boiling, mixing, and all these things, we had our fluffy white meringue which I promptly piped onto the now cool cupcakes in a swirled cone shape and threw them into the fridge. Meanwhile, we melted very dark chocolate and let that cool.
At this point, the 6" cake had finally finished cooking, and I decided to make up an icing recipe using marshmallow fluff, powdered sugar an egg white and a bit of butter. I had no plans for the cake, so I just poured the icing on top of the cake and let it drip off the sides. The cake looked kinda ugly with just the white over the chocolate. I just let that go for a while.
We also had way too much extra meringue. Bka decided we should bake it. So I piped some pretty little designs and we threw it in the oven and let it go.
Back to the real project: The meringue cone tops on the cupcakes would not solidify. I dipped one in chocolate and the meringue smooshed down a great deal. We put them in the freezer for a few minutes, hoping this would help
This did not. I got irritated and just dipped the rest, resigned to the rounded tops rather than the cones. I got significantly better as I went along thankfully.
The ugly cake was still irritating me, so I drizzled the extra dark chocolate all over it, making it all the more abstract and inherently artsy.
I'm pretty happy with it.
The meringues were funky. Following a precise recipe would probably be a good choice next time. But we learned that it is far better to let them bake for a long time (>40min) at a low temperature, than to be impatient. But they did look kinda pretty.
All in all, the night involved a lot more unknowns than I usually prefer at once, but it was fun, and I proceeded to bring baked goods to my classes for the next two days. Watching people spill the gooey meringue all over the physics hearth while trying to eat these things was definitely worth having to clean up the horrifying kitchen mess we created.
