Miss-Adventures with M.

Seriously, who's idea was meringue anyway? What an awful idea.

One is not supposed to begin one's blog with bitching, I'm sure. After all, this is supposed to be an attempt in making my life sound (read) interesting enough for you to continue reading after you have googled some random word and serendipitously come across my not-so-little world. Right? So the last thing desired is an almost housewife complaining about the complex world of meringue. Which is entirely too complicated to spell after a bottle of Pinot.

But I digress. A lot.

I have been trying to conquer the world of clean, naked spatulas (no grease!) egg whites (NO YOLKS) and sugar for about a week and a half and I am about ready to scrap the whole project. Except I have a sweet tooth the size of Paris Hilton's credit card bill to feed.

Apologies to those of you who googled "Naked Paris Hilton" and got me.

First I tried M. cookies (merangie is too hard to spell. Okay? We like M. better!). Simple ingredients, egg whites, check, sugar, check and cream of tartar, kinda check. You see I have an occasional craving for dessert mints, which are mainly cream of tartar. So I figured those might work.

I chopped up the dessert mints and added them to my egg whites. The roommates must have thought I was doing coke, after seeing grainy white powder left on a cutting board...

After adding all the ingredients together and cooking them for about 4 hours I got great cookies- on the outside. The inside was liquid. Nasty overly sweetened liquid oozing all over my counter.

Apologies to those of you who googled "Nasty Naked Paris Hilton" and got me.

Today, after a couple of other failed attempts at M. I tried again. This time it would be M. over a vanilla pudding pie. The first two ingredients were easy, a pre-made Graham cracker crust and instant vanilla pudding, thank you very much, Safeway. However, "instant" and "just add water" M. do not exist. So, once again, I tried. I used real cream of tartar (five bucks!), clean egg yolks and extra fine granulated sugar. I whipped it all together and added te M. on top of my pie. After a few minutes under the broiler, I thought I was done.

Just kidding. I had created crunchy M. And not in a good crunchy way. I mean a the-sugar-didn't-melt-for-squat sort of way.

Sigh. I'm going to Baker's Square.