Cardamom & Clove Meringues

After the rosemary cornmeal cake I made last night, I had some leftover egg whites. Not wanting to waste them, I decided to try my hand at meringue cookies. A quick search surprised me with more than one recipe that contained cardamom, one of my new favorite spices. Reading through the comments of these recipes lead me to believe that the cardamom wasn't exactly a perfect match, so I decided to round out the flavoring with some ground cloves. All the recipes seemed essentially the same: whip the crap out of the egg whites and gradually add the sugar and spices when soft peaks begin to form, then continue whipping until hard peaks form. It was about after 5 minutes of standing there holding my hand mixer that I began to long for that Kitchenaid of my dreams. I didn't have high expectations since this was my first time attempting meringues and am intimidated by egg whites to begin with, so I'm pretty sure I didn't use proper technique at all. In any event, I could never get true stiff peaks to form, so I waited as long as my patience allowed, then just stuffed the batter into a pastry bag and piped as many cookies as would fit on my pans.

I clearly need more than two pans. I ended up throwing about a third of the batter out...


Because the baking times between recipes varied considerably, I figured I would average them out. I don't know if it was the temperature of my oven or the previously described caveman mixing technique, but the cookies ended up cooking in half the length of time and burning a bit.

These two on the corner closest to the oven door were the only two not to completely brown.  They were also fairly hollow. Maybe this is how they are supposed to turn out? I'm going to have to do some reading. You can see the inside in the picture below.

The flavor was pretty good though. I think I added too much clove, but other than that very pleasant. Maybe next time (and maybe after some equipment upgrades) these will turn out better.