Saturday, October 12, 2013

Egg whites

What do you think of when you get up in the morning?
Lately, for me, it's been, 'What can I do with egg whites today?' Ever since I did a quadruple batch of America's test kitchen's pasta recipe that used 6 egg yolks, then made key lime pie for dessert, I have been on a mission to use up the 30 egg whites residing in my refrigerator.
  •  I used 8 making chocolate meringue cookies, This is not the exact recipe I used but is very similar, I sent some to CA with Jeffrey.. .. I think I finally did them 'right' they were crisp throughout; I like them better undercooked so they have a soft center. I'll go back to cooking them shorter and getting them out of the oven quickly.
  • Then six more making Pavlova I basically used this recipe but used 6 whites. Made the raspberry sauce and cut up strawberries and mixed them with fresh raspberries. Absolutely fabulous.
  • Then I made it again for my exercise buddies; but this time I did individual ones and followed this recipe. I piped this with a big star tip. Pat fixed the strawberries and Tess brought the whipped cream. I also brought leftover raspberry sauce. The big one was hard to serve, these small ones were almost perfect....next time the circle will be smaller though. I traced around a 28 oz. tomato can, and it was almost too much dessert.(I traced with a permanent pen on the underside of the parchment paper that I lined the cookie sheet with.) I liked the extra crispy bits that came with the piping. The recipe said to cook at 275 for 50-60 minutes. That would be too long. I set my timer for 20 minutes then lowered the temperature 25 degrees and cooked them another 20 minutes and they were close to perfect.
  • Cinnamon star cookies. Recipe here. I made this...oh a hundred years ago and loved them.The recipe I linked to and the recipe I used was from Joy of Cooking. As you can see they are not very star like. I forgot to pull out some of the meringue before I added the almonds, so I just used my cookie scoop and made large balls. They flattened as they cooked and were still yummy. I purchased 3 different kinds of cinnamon a couple months ago and used the spiciest, Vietnamese "Saigon" one here.  It tastes a bit like 'Red Hots', those little red candies. Learned that my 16 year old does not like the texture of ground up almonds, so he won't eat these cookies. They are too fragile to hold up to shipping them to Jeffrey. What will I do?
  • Chocolate dipped macaroons used 4. This cookie got chosen because the technique was different. The cookies are put together in a frying pan, cooked there for...... less than 10 minutes, then cooled, formed and baked. I wanted to try that.Oh so good. Easy even though the technique is a bit different.
If you've done the math you know that now I have 3 egg yolks to use somewhere!

incidentally I generally put my egg whites in a small bowl with wrap on top. I can write the number of whites on the cellophane. Generally 1 egg white = 2 Tablespoons. So, 4 whites is 1/2 cup.

3 comments:

Liz Johnston said...

wow! and we just had egg white omelets when we had leftovers from ice cream making. I think I will do the chewy chocolate cookies next time.

Laurie said...

The chocolate cookies were better than an omelet...I forgot to say that we used Pecans instead of walnuts....of course, since we live in TEXAS.

Kids and Canning Jars said...

I loved your "gray" cookies....
I am going to add your blog to my list of blogs I follow...
Melissa