The Perfect Meringue + Fairtrade Love

by Paul Taylor June 12, 2022

Being Fairtrade is something that's really important to us at Beth's Kitchen. We love to try and source as many Fairtrade ingredients as we can at the best quality we can.

About 80% of the worlds sugar comes from sugar cane, which is grown by millions of small scale farmers in some of the poorest countries. Buying Fairtrade helps these farmers get a fair price for their cane, and gives the families and communities help and support. It is something that’s so simple for us to do, yet it can help those farmers and communities more than we can imagine.

Meringues are one of the things that we love to bake, so we’re sharing with you a fool proof recipe that’ll get you the PERFECT meringue each time – a crisp outer shell and a marshmallowy centre.

Ingredients:

100g free range egg whites (around 3 eggs)
200g Fairtrade caster sugar
piping bag & nozzle (optional)

Preheat your oven to 100 degrees, line two baking trays with baking paper – use a little blob of meringue mix in each corner of the trays to keep your baking paper from moving around when piping your meringues.
In a clean bowl, whisk your egg whites. Starting off on a low speed, then bringing it up to a medium speed. Do this until they form stiff peaks.
Now add your sugar to the egg whites a spoonful at a time, whilst continuing to whisk on a medium speed. Do this gradually, as if you add it in all at once or too quickly it will collapse the egg whites.
Once all the sugar is added, whisk on high speed for around five minutes. When it’s ready your mixture should be stiff and glossy, and when you rub it between your fingers you shouldn’t be able to feel any grains of sugar. Now it’s ready to pipe or spoon on your trays.
If you want to use a nozzle go for it! We use a star nozzle to get the swirl shape or a round one for the perfect meringue kiss, but be creative! Or alternatively you can just cut a whole in the end of the piping bag to create kisses, or just simply use a tea spoon to do little blobs of fluffy meringue. Either way you decide, pipe/blob the meringues onto your prepared trays and place them in your preheated oven.
Bake for 30 minutes (this is for a meringue kiss size, the bigger the meringue the longer the time!). Then turn off your oven and leave them in there with the door closed until completely cool. This will prevent them from cracking, which can happen if they have a sudden change in temperature.
Once cooled, they’re ready to eat!

Some ways we love to decorate ours... paint splats are a great way to get colour onto your meringues in a super cool way, just mix a little food colour paste with water and flick onto the cooled meringues with a paint brush. Freeze dried fruit powders also give a great affect, just sieve the powders onto the top of your cooled meringues - our favs are raspberry & passionfruit.

All information sourced from https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/