This is a recipe I have been wanting to try forever! I lived in Louisiana for a few years and just loved this tradition, how people eat this cake all Mardi Gras season. It was a neat way to end the day on Fridays at the office. People in Louisiana are always very convivial and I've learnt so much about the various traditions (besides what people see on TV) of the Carnival season in Louisiana. So this is a salute to those whose friendship made these years fantastic!

The recipe I found was this one. I don't remember when I found it but apparently it comes from the February 2006 edition of Southern Living. Well, I can tell you I am incredibly happy with the end result, so this recipe goes into the family recipe book!

I had some egg whites leftover, 6 of them to be exact, and I was looking for a way to use them. So I tried meringues. I was a bit leery but am I glad I made them. They are just DELISH!!!!
I looked around for simple recipes, found one I could use but ended up modifying it. My final result is a keeper!
The recipe I found called for 4 egg whites and 350g of sugar. Now, meringues are supposed to be sweet but this sounded like a huge amount of sugar. Many comments on that recipe called for less sugar... So this is what I came up with...

Ingredients:
6 egg whites - 200g sugar

Preparation:
Start beating the whites. When they start getting foamy, add the sugar a little at a time. Keep beating until firm and glossy. The egg whites should form a beak on the whisk when you remove it from the whites. Pour the preparation into a pastry bag with a large star shaped tip. Place your meringues on a parchment-paper covered cookie sheet, about 1 inch apart. Put in the oven at 195 degrees for about 2hours.

Notes:

• Some recipes called for the use of vinegar and cornstarch to guarantee the whitest meringues. Mine had a very light tan but it was uniform and glossy so not off-putting.
• The recipe I used as a basis was giving as baking directions: 20 min at 245 degrees and then one hour at 210. I followed that and I think that is where the tan comes from. I then looked it up some more and have determined that 195 degrees for 2 hours seems more the norm. Leave the meringues in your oven after you turn it off to continue letting them dry.
• I used granulated sugar. Many recipes seem to call for powdered sugar. Since powdered sugar has cornstarch in it, it might be a good idea to use it to maybe get that white meringue. I however do not regret my choice.
• This quantity is a lot. I have wasted half of it, following the dual temperature baking instructions. If baking everything at 195, I would keep baking all of them. As it was, half the quantity gave me about 75 bite-size meringues.
• These are basic meringues but it got me thinking of possibilities. So I will definitely be looking into this again.

Have you ever made meringues? Do you have recipes to share?

I love this time of year! I love decorating my house for Christmas and I go crazy! I dream of making tons of cookies and decorating them... Notice how I said “dream”? Yes, with my last batch of cookies, I seriously hurt my hands trying to ice them. Hard to imagine, I know, that icing could be a dangerous job, but there you have it. I started decorating with white icing and had to wait for it to dry before starting on color. Well, that never got done. My hands still hurt, almost two weeks later, and unfortunately, my job requires me spending my days in front of the computer, which doesn’t help...

But enough whining, I did manage to do some baking during this past holiday, but forgot to take a picture. I made a sugar pie, a traditional pie from Belgium. It tasted good, but always better the next day. I’m not sure I enjoyed the almonds too much though.

Another aspect of baking I need to work on is the crust. Not the recipe itself, it’s the Flemish piecrust (with yeast), but the baking. I don’t know if I’m using the wrong pan (9” pie pan) but I seem to have such a big edge to this pie and it gets too brown during the baking. I tried covering it with foil but I think I’ll invest in one of those pie edge protectors.

With my husband making his pumpkin pie and a friend making a pumpkin cake, my pie was not the most popular, except for me since *gasp* I don’t like pumpkin... but my daughter did help me finish it in the following days.

I think I will definitely remake one, probably during my Christmas break...

So, after a short break on the blog – it’s not that I didn’t bake, it’s just that it was such a huge flop I felt ashamed to talk about it – I picked another project for yesterday. I collected two recipes from one of the blogs I mentioned last time (sweetopia.net) and decided to try them. Now, this woman, Marian, does fantastic work with decorating cookies. I’m so jealous... but it also gives me incentive to try. I love the recipe I used before, the sablé recipe (a French recipe), but I wanted to try sugar cookies. Marian had two recipes, one with white sugar and one with brown sugar. So I tried both... :-)

OK, lessons learned from this:

• It’s a two-person job!!!! Thank goodness, my friend Mary was there and she didn’t hesitate to jump in. We had lots of great laughs... but it was tough work, whether mixing the ingredients or rolling the dough.
• This is time-consuming. I mean, counting rest time in the fridge, it took me close to 9 hours and I still have some dough in the fridge. Hmmm, it might not have been the smartest thing to do to do both recipes at once...
• Cream the butter by itself before anything else, much much easier to mix.
• Lots of these recipes are made for people who can afford these stand mixers with paddle attachment and others. Mine has two beaters, it doesn’t work as well. I noticed that when directions say to mix the butter and sugar until thoroughly mixed, a minute or so... Yeah it took much longer for me and then the butter gets all caked up into the beaters... and I’m stressing because the recipe says not to overbeat... HELP!!!
• The  dough warms up VERY quickly and as soon as it warms up a little, it becomes almost unmanageable.  I ended up rolling the dough, putting it in the fridge, using the cookie cutters on the dough, putting it in the fridge, separating the cookies and putting them on a cookie sheet, then fridge, then bake them. Oh, you might want to rearrange your fridge BEFORE starting the whole thing, tough to find room for all those cookie sheets otherwise...
• I did buy pieces of wood to ensure a more regular thickness in my dough... Of course, they work only if you use them... So my cookies have different thicknesses which matters when you bake them (baking time varies).
• The taste is good. It is less sweet than these packets you buy in grocery stores. The first taste I got, there was a weird aftertaste on the top of my mouth, in the back. My daughter had the same thing. However, that aftertaste was not there later on at night, so I’ll say it was due to what we had for dinner.

Quite a few lessons... Next step, icing... But in the meantime, here are some pictures and links to the recipes.

Sugar cookies
Brown Sugar cookies