Chocolate Meringue

Finally I am writing about non-breakfast baking, and this time I am going for a traditional french sweet snack - Meringue. A super easy yet impressive treat. I am not extremely sweet-toothed but to make great meringues you need a lot of sugar which means they have to be super sweet (to me they are.) My way to enjoy this sugar bombs are eating them with a pot of hot tea or add a piece of dark chocolate. I tried this recipe from allrecipes.com (Yes it is one of the top 5 online recipe sources of mine) and modified only the chocolate, one sweet advice: never reduce the amount of sugar.

Chocolate Meringue

3 Egg whites
1/8 Tspn Cream of Tartar
1/2 Tspn Vanilla Extract
2/3 Cup of White Sugar
1 Tbspn Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
1/3 Cup Semisweet Chocolate Chips (Instead of using semisweet chocolate chips I used dark chocolate blocks by crushing a bar of dark chocolate)

Preheat oven to 150 degree Celsius; makes around 36 meringues; preparation time: 10 minutes

1. Put eggwhites, cream of tartar and vanilla in a big bowl, beat until the mixture form soft peaks.

2. Slowly add sugar; beat until stiff peaks form and mixture becomes glossy.

3. Fold in cocoa and chocolate blocks. I set 36 pieces aside because I want to put one on top of each meringue before putting them into the oven.

4. Drop mixture with 2 big table spoons (if you are making bite-size meringues, use teaspoons) onto a baking sheet/ cloth. Bake for 25-30 minutes.

These are the chocolates I chose
- From supermarket: http://www.chocolatfrey.com/
- From baking shop: http://www.ghirardelli.com/
                               http://www.valrhona.com/accueil.aspx

And yes I never use milk chocolate; the bitterness completes the snack!

BEFORE

AFTER