Air cake at home. Meringue secrets

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

Extra proteins always remain with those housewives who are fond of cooking desserts and pastries. Where to put a lot of proteins? Of course, let them cook meringues. After all, it is this airy cake with a delicate crispy crust that will not leave indifferent any sweet tooth.

Refined delicacy

Meringue has a lot of names, but they all represent something delicate, weightless, light. From French, this word is translated as "gentle kiss." Pre-revolutionary Russia knew the airy meringue cake as the “Spanish wind”. Quite often this dessert is called "meringue". Meringue, as many cookbooks say, is just protein cream, but dried cream of proteins with a crispy crust is already meringues.

But whatever the name of this dessert, in whatever country it is prepared, you will not find a strong difference between the recipe. The composition of the cake is quite simple: protein and granulated sugar. However, an airy protein cake is a rather fragile and capricious substance, sometimes bringing a lot of disappointment and unpleasant feelings to an inexperienced cook.surprises.

Experienced chefs advise beginners to cook meringue at home if they want to, not to run straight to the refrigerator and not to get eggs from the tray. To begin with, you should “arm yourself” with theoretical knowledge, learn some secrets of cooking, and then proceed directly to sculpting a culinary masterpiece.

How to cook meringue

You can cook many dishes at home, including an airy cake. You will find the recipe with a photo in our article. Today we will reveal a few cooking secrets that will surely be useful for novice housewives.

French way

So, there are several popular ways to prepare meringue. The French method is considered the simplest of them. It can be used in cases where it is not required to make an airy cake of some ornate complex shapes. The French version involves beating chilled egg whites until stiff with a pinch of s alt. Sugar is added only at the final stage of preparation. The protein mass in this case is quite lush. Hard peaks are a symbol of the correct consistency of meringue cream.

Italian way

Italian chefs have come up with a slightly different way of making meringue. After you whip the chilled proteins, you should add not ordinary granulated sugar to them, but a sugar syrup prepared in advance. It turns out that with a steep, almost boiling syrup, you brew proteins, and then they will not fall off during baking. Such a protein cream is perfect for making complex shapes of cakes, and for layering cakes. In addition, the Italian version allows you to add butter if you need to make cream for the cake. The French version, when combined with fats, will flow.

Swiss style

The densest and most persistent airy meringue cake is obtained from Swiss culinary specialists. But this method is considered the most time-consuming and time-consuming, since a water bath is involved in the preparation. But if you have the patience to make meringue in a water bath according to the Swiss method, then you can easily draw ornate patterns on cakes with the resulting cream, deposit it on unusual shaped cookies. Such a cream will not fall off, will not fail when baking, will not leak out.

Required Ingredients

• Protein from five eggs.
• 250 grams of granulated sugar.
• A pinch of s alt or a teaspoon of lemon juice.

Cooking process

Prepared dishes, ingredients. We start beating the egg whites. Add a pinch of s alt or citric acid. Beat at low speed until small air bubbles appear. Gradually add powdered sugar to the mass. We continue to manipulate until the cream is thick enough. It should not slip off the whisk, it should be, as the chefs call it, hard peaks.

Prepare a baking sheet, line it with oiled paper. You can deposit meringue both with the help of a special confectionery syringe, and with the help of an ordinary tablespoon.

The oven is preheated to 80-100 degrees. Depending on the size and thickness of the cakes, they should be baked from one and a half to two hours. When the meringues are cooked, do not rush to remove them from the baking sheet. Let the dish cool down a bit. When the cakes are cool, gently lift them off the sheet and remove.

Cooking secrets

So, you have chosen for yourself a convenient and acceptable way to cook meringue. Now it remains to learn a few secrets, the knowledge of which will help even an inexperienced hostess to create an exquisite, airy culinary miracle.

• When you start making meringue, remember that the proteins must be fresh.
• When you make a fluffy cake at home, try to break each egg over a separate dish. Of course, you were promised in the store that the eggs are the freshest, but sometimes incidents happen. Agree, it will be very unpleasant if one smelling “something” is added to four good proteins. Job ruined, start over. Do you need it?!
• In order to dissolve the sugar in the protein cream faster, first grind it into a fine powder. You can buy ready-made in the store. Remember, the finer the granulated sugar, the faster it will dissolve, the faster you will beat the mass.

• Some housewives add a pinch of s alt each while whipping. But experienced connoisseurs still advise giving preference to citric acid or lemon juice. If you takeacid, our recipe will require one teaspoon of citric acid diluted in two teaspoons of water.
• A must rule if you want to make the perfect fluffy meringue cake - use only clean (very clean!) dishes and beaters. The tools used should be free of grease and other impurities.
• To get the perfect meringue at the end, use this trick. Spread a special baking paper on a baking sheet, on which you first draw even circles. When you squirt cream with a syringe, it will be easier for you to make all the cakes even and the same.