55. Meringues and various other (not my) recipes from the past two weeks
Well, its been a weird old couple of weeks. I hope you are all well and staying in and staying safe as much as you can. I have relocated from my tiny London flat to my Dad’s house in the countryside for, well, the foreseeable future. This means that I am without my usual baking rammel and oven. There’s just an AGA here, which is fine, but needs some getting used to!
As this upheaval has been happening, I haven’t been experimenting and doing my usual recipe testing for the blog, at least partially due to lack of time and partially due to lack of easy supply of ingredients, such as flour. So over the past 2 weeks I have made: custard tarts, meringues and challah bread, only one of which was my own recipe, and only one of which I got pictures of.
Below you will find my recipe for meringues and links for the recipes for custard tarts and challah bread, with a couple of additional notes on how I slightly altered the recipes.
Custard Tarts
In this recipe I substituted the pastry for the vanilla shortcrust pastry I made for the Polka Dot Chocolate Tart, in the same quantity as that recipe. It made 9 custard tarts and they were very very tasty, but no pictures. Oops. I also HALVED the amounts for the custard recipe as I was making individual custard tarts, rather than one large one, so needed less.
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/custard-tart
Meringues
Another no pictures I’m afraid, but these were made to use up the egg whites left over from the custard tarts recipe.
Ingredients
4 egg whites
115g (4oz) caster sugar
115g (4oz) icing sugar
Method
Whisk the egg whites up to medium peaks and then, while still beating on a low speed, add in the sugar a tablespoon at a time, giving at least a couple of seconds between tablespoons. Continue beating once the sugar is all added if you have not yet achieved stiff peaks.
Sift the icing sugar onto the egg whites and gently fold in so as not to knock out any air.
Preheat an oven to 100C and prepare two baking trays with non-stick paper and a piping bag with a star nozzle.
Fill the piping bag with the meringue mixture and pipe meringue nests onto your baking trays.
Bake for 1h15mins - 1h30 mins until firm and easy to pick up off the baking sheet.
Challah Bread
This bread was a recipe from one of my favourite Youtubers/Instagrammers Georgia’s Cakes, a Le Cordon Bleu alumni. She is currently doing a back to basics series of recipes and this challah bread was ery easy and very yummy.
The recipe video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPS-M32Zrts
I altered the braiding pattern used though, as I wanted to be able to use the bread for sandwiches if possible, so I did a 4 strand braid, for which you can find photos and instructions below.
4 strand braid
Lay out your 4 strands in front of you, well spaced and press the tops of all of them together.
Take the far left hand strand and place it over the two middle strands.
Take the far right hand strand and place it over the new two middle strands
Take the strand that is now middle right and place it over the middle left strand. Respace the strands as necessary.
Repeat steps 2-4 until completely braided, then press any loose ends together.
Tuck the ends underneath the braid and transfer to a lined baking tray.
Bake exactly as in Georgia’s recipe.
