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...