I wanted to do something slightly challenging and interesting and I didn't want to have to go to the supermarket for ingredients. After a bit of back and forth over what to make, I finally landed on a recipe that my sister had sent me ages ago in one of those insane Facebook "watch something cook/bake at high speed for about 30 seconds" videos. So ya know, I'm sure it will be a flawless set of directions. Here I go, taking a recipe from a YouTube video (I am literally shuddering at the thought) to make Hydrangea Meringue cookies for Mother's Day. I'm a little late on the whole Mother's Day thing, apparently. Credit to Haniela's for the recipe and video.
The basic idea is to make meringue cookies but to split the batter? dough? meringue? into three different colors and pipe them all at the same time to get a festive swirl of color. I'm not describing it well. You could just go watch the video to see what I mean. Or you could read on because the process will make it abundantly clear. I hope.
First step, make the meringue. Since meringue is only three ingredients, it's pretty straightforward. Start with room temperature egg whites. No way am I waiting for those things to come to room temperature. If memory serves me correctly, we want the egg whites to be room temperature so that it's easier to form the stiff peaks when it's whipped. But that doesn't really make sense with these directions. Because I was supposed to whisk the egg whites and the sugar and then put the bowl over a pot of boiling water and whisk until the sugar dissolved. Soooooo...wouldn't that just warm up the egg whites anyway? Am I missing some high tech baking physics? I truly have no idea. Whatever, I whisked the egg whites and sugar until it pretty much looked like the sugar had dissolved. It was really hard to tell. But I've made meringues before and I don't recall ever doing this step. I'm thinking it'll be fine.
Next, add the vanilla extract and whip until stiff peaks are formed. In my world, that means turn on the mixer and walk away. I decided to use the time to cut my parchment paper and set up my piping bags. I needed one large and three small piping bags and fortunately for me and my hatred of cleaning up, I have disposable piping bags right now. Yay! Simplicity! I also pulled out my handy dandy new food dye kit. It has eight colors and an entire color chart saying how many drops of each color to get certain other colors. There are at least 50 colors in this chart! Devotees will recall that I have trouble mixing colors to make anything that makes sense. So I saw this kit while I was at Michael's picking up something else and decided it was worth the expense. A whole ten dollars (with my 40% off coupon) is well-worth making something actually look appetizing.
Ultimately, I decided to go with the combination of Mother's Day colors that were in the video because they're so pretty together. A pastel pink, purple, and blue. I divided my meringue into three separate bowls, thanked my lucky stars that I bought that three-pack of spatulas, and set about dying my meringues. (Meringue? Meringues? I'm not so sure about that one.) My first attempt was the purple. Two drops pink and one drop blue. Here we go! I tried to very gently fold -
Hang on, we interrupt this blog post because I just pulled dried meringue out of my hair. How did that even happen? Weird.
Ok, back to folding in the colors. I tried to be really really gentle so that I wouldn't destroy the meringue but I also had to mix it enough that there weren't streaks of blue and white and pink. And believe it or not...it worked! It worked just fine! The blue and the pink went equally perfectly until I ended up with three bowls of meringue that looked like this:
Isn't that just gorgeous? I'm so proud! If I had these colors, my cupcakes would've looked SO much better! Now for the tricky part: actually piping these suckers. I filled the three little piping bags with each color separately, cut off the ends, and then basically shoved the three bags together into the large bag fitted with a large star tip. The idea here is that all three colors come out at the same time. Makes sense in principle. However, the first three cookies were entirely blue. Eh, whatever, I have three blue cookies. No big deal. I was also supposed to prepare a template to pipe perfectly even circular cookies but it was really easy to make them all the same size. Plus preparing a template takes time and effort. All I had to do was pipe once in the center and then five or six pipes around that to end up with these cute spikey rainbow-colored cookies.
One problem: the recipe is supposed to make 12 cookies. There was no way I was making giant cookies. In and of itself, this isn't a problem because I'll get twice the cookies that are half the size. The only problem is that I only prepared one pan. So I had to start to work fast because it was starting to feel like the meringue was getting too warm and losing its shape. Cut the parchment paper, piped the cookies on, and then with the tiny bit of meringue I had left, I added another layer around the blue cookies so that they'd be less boring.
Whew! That was some quick piping! Now into the oven for the next two hours. And then to cool in the oven overnight. Hmm. I'm thinking that I'll have to wake up early to pack these super fast before I can take them to work. Whoops. So here I sit, waiting for my cookies to bake. Maybe I'll go rewatch Big Hero 6 so it's fresh in my mind to review. But here's some pictures of the pre-baked cookies for you to see how nicely they're turning out.
[Next day]
Oh hey, they look like meringue cookies! There was really no need to take more pictures because meringues don't do anything in the oven in terms of changing shape and color. I woke up in the morning, pulled the pans out of the (cold) oven, and they were super easy to pick up off the parchment paper, which was a good indication that they cooked correctly. I packed them up in a tupperware, threw the pretty cookie bags into my bag, and headed to work bright and early. I had a momentary panic when I realized that nobody actually comes into the office on Fridays so no one will receive them until Monday but a quick Google search indicated that they should keep just fine. Of course, in my hurry this morning, I forgot to grab one to taste! They look pretty good though so I think they will taste just fine. Maybe I'll update you in my next post to tell you if they're good or not.
Quick side note: last night I felt just like the mom in a Christmas Story yelling at her husband "don't you dare touch that oven!" As soon as the timer went off, my husband said, "Cool, can I have a cookie now?" Let's just say he was not pleased to learn that they had to cool in the oven overnight. Patience is a virtue.
A Disney Moment: Big Hero 6
So I know I said that I was going to rewatch before reviewing but well...I didn't. Got distracted by Olympics stuff instead. But one thing that I do find telling is that I had to go back to my posts to see which rankings I hadn't assigned yet. That's how close I find all of the movies in this group (excluding Winnie the Pooh). So for this movie, I think I'm landing on a 4/5 but a 4/5 in this group is really more like a 1/5 in the dark times Disney groupings. Although, I guess anything is a 1/5 compared to the dark times Disney films...
My favorite part of Big Hero 6 was the very creative world that was built. There was just something so cool about San Fransokyo to me. I loved looking at the background and seeing the blending of San Francisco and Tokyo architecture. Maybe that's because I'm a nerd. I also loved seeing the intellect being something that's valued in this fictional future world. So it's a super hero movie but the only super thing is the technology that is being used (Iron Man-style). Makes sense that I'd like this approach more because the only super hero movies I can tolerate are the ones that have Iron Man.
In other news, how adorable is Baymax? I just loved him and his whole character. The "drunk" scene was especially hilarious in an "I can't believe Disney is doing this" sort of way. Somewhat dumb of me because they did do a drunk baby elephant in Dumbo so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. This movie made me laugh, this movie made me cry, this movie made me think but it's still only a 4/5. Why is that...?
I guess it's because it's not a musical and I tend to be a bit biased against non-musical Disney films. I also found that I just don't remember large sections of the movie. A rewatch probably would've made me rank this higher but I think that the fact that it didn't stick in my mind much says something. Oh whatever, Disney films are awesome. Nuff said.
Only one more movie to go! And then you get to (finally, after 5 whole years of waiting) find out what got ranked as the best Disney film of all time!
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