COOKBOOKS GALORE

I made this last week for a friend’s birthday. It’s easy to make, but looks impressive. It’s a pavlova with a top! For the cake you need : 4 egg whites, 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar, 125g light Muscovado sugar, 100g caster sugar, 1teaspoon white wine vinegar Filling: 200ml double cream, 250g strawberries Preheat oven 150C/gas 2.     Grease and base line 2 x20 cm sandwich tins Whisk egg whites and cream of tartar in bowl till stiff. Put the sugars together then add to the white a bit at a time. Whisk a few minutes more till nice and thick and shiny. Divide equally between the sandwich tins and bake for 35 - 45 mins till light brown. Cool on a wire rack. Whip the double cream to peaks. Save 8 strawberries and slice the rest up. Put one meringue on a plate and cover with half of the cream Sprinkle the strawberry slices over the cream then put the second meringue on top. Cover this with the rest of the cream then slice the 8 remaining strawberries in half and arrange in t...

Thought I'd post something sumptuous for Valentine's Day. I'm cheating a bit because my daughter made this, with a little help from me. It's a lovely dessert with a meringue base, delicious chocolate cream layer, more meringue, then topped with a good layer of grated chocolate. You could buy 2 large meringue discs to save making them. This is a recipe from my French friend, and she says it originates in the North of France. Meringues:  2 egg whites, 60g caster sugar and 60g icing sugar Ganache:     150g dark chocolate, 150ml single cream Topping:      100g grated dark chocolate It's best to make the meringues the day before, but it's up to you! Heat oven 160C/gas3              Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone sheets Beat egg whites till stiff and add half of the 2 sugars. Whisk again then add the other half and whisk till shiny. Put into a piping bag and pipe into 2 large discs onto ...

I love rhubarb, and decided to make something different with it for my friends when they came for tea. I've recently bought a new 12 hole fluted tartlet tin, so decided to use this and to top the tartlets with meringue. I have a recipe with fruit, which has a creamy almond filling, so this would make them a bit different. 250g shortcrust pastry [your own recipe or bought] 400g rhubarb 80g caster sugar 125g ground almonds 80g soft butter 125g caster sugar 2 eggs beaten For the meringue 3 egg whites 75g caster sugar Preheat oven 180C Peel the rhubarb and cut into pieces. Put it into a bowl covered with the 80g caster sugar and leave for an hour. Roll the pastry out thinly and line the tartlet tin. Using baking beans, bake blind for 10 mins. Take the beans out and cook for a further 5 min. Remove the pastry cases from the tin and put on a wire rack to cool. Beat the butter with the caster sugar; add the eggs then the ground almonds and ...

I recently posted on a friend's blog that I haven't been able to find any gooseberries this year. Sadly we left our gooseberry bushes in our French garden, and haven't room here to plant any. On Sunday we went to Suffolk for our granddaughter's 5th birthday, and my lovely German dil gave me a bagful of gooseberries given to her by a friend - they don't like them. She also gave me this recipe handed on by her grandmother. It's not the prettiest cake, but it is delicious. I had to change a couple of things in the recipe as we can't find them in the UK [maybe you could online?] such as 'Sahnesteif' which helps cream stiffen and packet vanilla sugar. In the German recipe they used single cream, but I used double cream. The German recipe also used a packet meringue mix, but I made my own. Preheat oven 160C/ gas 3 Grease 1 or 2 x 26cm springform cake tin and line the base with parchment paper. Beat 100g of butter and 100g caster sugar toge...

My sil came for the day and brought a bundle of rhubarb. It's one of our favourite things to eat, so I decided to make a couple of easy recipes with it. The first was a simple rhubarb tart with a meringue topping, a change from a pie or a crumble. I used a pack of bought shortcrust pastry, which made it even quicker to make, but of course you can make your own. 1 pack shortcrust pastry 600g rhubarb 2 tbspn granulated sugar 3 egg whites 175g caster sugar pinch salt 1 tspn lemon juice Preheat oven 180C/gas4 Roll out the pastry to fit a 23cm tart tin. Prick the pastry with a fork. . Trim the rhubarb and cut into 3cm chunks, then spread it over the pastry. Sprinkle the tbpsns of sugar over. Bake for about 25mins. While it's cooking, whip the egg whites with the salt into stiff peaks. Gradually add the sugar and the lemon juice and carry on beating. Take the tart out of the oven and top with the meringue, then put it back in the oven for about ...

It was my daughter's birthday recently and she came up for the weekend, so needed a cake - this was just the thing. It's made with oil not butter and is very easy to make, yet it looks 'an occasion' cake. Preheat oven 190C/gas5 Grease and line 2x18cm [7"] sandwich tins For the cake you need to sieve 150g plain flour, 25g cornflour and 2 level tspns baking powder into a bowl. Mix together 100ml veg oil [I used sunflower] and 100ml water in another bowl. Separate 2 eggs and add the yolks to the oil/water mixture and mix together. Stir the dry ingredients in and mix to a batter. Whisk the egg whites till stiff then fold into the mixture. Divide into the tins then bake for 25-30 mins. Cool on a wire rack. Turn the oven off. For the little meringues you need to put 1 egg white in a clean dry bowl and whisk till stiff and dry. Mix together 40g caster sugar and 15g icing sugar, then gradually whisk them into the whites. Put a sheet of baking paper or a silicon...

Off on holiday to France tomorrow, so thought I'd post a French recipe. Will be back posting in 2 weeks. At the weekend I picked just enough rhubarb to make some kind of dessert. Wanted something different, and browsing through some old French cookery magazines, I found a recipe for a meringue tart with a difference, as it has a custard layer on the rhubarb before you add the meringue topping. Sounded like a great idea. I love rhubarb, but we haven't a very big garden so I have to make good use of what we can grow! It uses a 27cm tart tin, which is quite big. So, you need: 350g of shortcrust pastry 1 kg rhubarb 1 egg and 2 yolks 20cl of cream 1 tbspn vanilla sugar 150 g of caster sugar (50g for marinating the rhubarb and about 100g or a bit less in the custard] 1 tbspn cornflour For the  meringue :  2 egg whites 50g caster sugar per egg Preheat oven 220C/gas 8 Make the pastry and chill. Cut the rhubarb stems into 2cm pieces, taking the strin...

I wanted to make something special for my friend's birthday. She's a great fan of chocolate cakes, so I decided to combine another of her loves, meringue, with a chocolate cake. I looked through my cookery books and online for ideas, and there were plenty of them. Too many were very complicated and had lots of layers. I wanted a much simpler cake, but with a twist. So I decided on  a sandwich cake with a meringue layer on top and in the middle, and there's also some lime curd in the middle to give the cake an extra bit of zing. I bought a jar of this curd from a farmer's market recently, and don't know what to do with it! It's not a very green colour, so really it doesn't look very different from a lemon curd. The flavour seems to me to be a bit sharper. For the cake  - beat 115g of butter with 115g of caster sugar till nice and fluffy. Add 3 egg yolks one at a time,  then add 100g sr flour which has been mixed with 55g cocoa powder. Pour in 50ml of milk a...

A very Happy New Year! Here's to lots of great baking. After the success of the meringue on Christmas Day, I thought I'd try a variation as a dessert for New Year's Eve. I hunted through my cookbooks and folders and found a recipe for a meringue log in a Home and Freezer Christmas book. Anyone remember Home and Freezer magazines, littles ones which were always in racks by the checkouts? Anyway I thought it sounded ideal, although it has a fewextra ingredients in it, like mini marshmallows. You could use a chocolate sauce as the filling instead of the spread if you wanted, as this what was in the original recipe. I thought the spread would be more substantial when rolling up the log. I had visions of the sauce running out of the sides of the log! I know there's hazelnuts in the spread, but I don't think this will change the taste of the log very much. 5 egg whites, beaten 150g icing sugar, plus 1 tbsp extra 2 tsp cornflour, sieved  1 tbsp cocoa powder 400m...