Welcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon and this week Millie and thousands of others requested
a dessert recipe, so let's make one that is so beautiful that you wish you were the one tasting
it. To begin with we need to make meringue. Simply whip together sugar, icing sugar and egg whites on
high speed until you get these lovely luscious looking stiff peaks of meringue that hold their
own shape. Take out a small amount of the meringue mixture and add some pink gel food colour and mix
it through until the swirls of colour blend into one uniform shade. Now for the tricky part getting
the meringue into the Piping Bag without making a mess. If you turn down the top of the bag and put
it over your fingers and thumb you can hold the bag open with one hand and push the meringue down
into the bag using a spatula in the other hand and once the bag is full you can just unfold the
top shake it down a bit twist and you're ready to go. Carefully pipe two stripes of pink onto
rectangles of acetate now I'll put the sizes of the acetate and the recipe quantities and all
those nitty-gritty details on the how to cook that website for you. Take some of the white meringue
and pipe strips to fill all the gaps and make a stripy pattern that will encase our desert.
Use a spatula to flatten that out this helps to fill any gaps and make it a nice even layer
then scrape some of the meringue off one end so you've got a clear bit of acetate there. Then
carefully lift up the acetate and you've got that perfect rectangle. Roll it up and place it into
a cookie cutter so it holds that cylindrical shape. If you have a gap in the meringue like
I do just add a little bit more to seal it up and if you don't have an abundance of cookie cutters
then you can simply use some tape to hold it in place, this method is actually easier for
getting it the exact size because it can just join the meringue up where it meets.
Now these need to go into a warm oven to slowly dry out the temperature is only 70 degrees Celsius
or 158 F and I like to use an oven thermometer for this because my oven doesn't have markers for that
lower temperature. They need to stay in there for about three hours until they're just really light
and Airy when you pick them up they've just got no weight to them patience is the key here. While
they're drying out put the egg yolks and sugar into a bowl and whisk them together until they're
silky. Microwave that for about 30 seconds then whisk again well and you're going to microwave it
a second time and watch it carefully and when it starts to swell up take it out and it should look
a bit like the moon. Whisk it again and just as a side note here because we've added lots of sugar
to the egg yolks they're not going to explode in the microwave. Now the bowl is quite hot so
I want you to tip that into another bowl and then cover it and chill it and we will use that later.
Now for the star of the show strawberries wash and hull them and then we're going to
microwave them for one minute and you'll notice some liquid starts to form at the bottom of the
bowl. I want you to strain that off give the strawberries a quick stir be gentle with them
here you don't want to mash them and then put them back into the microwave and I want you to
repeat that until you've extracted a good amount of this delicious pure strawberry juice and on
the other side you have a bowl of lovely soft cooked strawberries. Place the strawberries
on a lined tray and put them in the fridge to chill. Next we need a crunchy surprise in the
bowl of a mixer combine butter and icing sugar then add almond meal, eggs and the flour you
can put that in all at once I just can't get it tippy and I don't have enough room between
the mixer there so I'm spooning it in and you want to mix that until it is just combined.
Spread that mixture out between two sheets of baking paper and then remove the top sheet.
Slide that onto a baking tray and bake it in the oven for 10 minutes. Now by this time it will be
perfectly soft enough to cut but firm enough to hold its shape, so you can quickly cut out the
circles this is much quicker and easier than it is trying to do it with that soft doughy mixture. now
you want these to be a size that can hide inside the meringue cylinders that we made. Once you've
cut all those circles out return them to the oven and bake them until they're golden and crispy.
Now it's time to create a delicate decoration for the top. Mix together icing sugar and butter and
some of those divine cooked strawberries I just want to eat all these they taste really good now
add in the glucose syrup and lastly the flour and just mix it until it's well combined. Cut circles
out of baking paper and place that sheet on top of another one. Put a little bit of the mixture
to one side and then using a spatula spread a very thin layer across the top of the circles.
lift up the top paper and bake those circles in the oven until they look like this. Once they cool
down you get these delightfully delicate super fine very thin crispy decorations. You want to
store those in an airtight container to keep them crisp until we're ready to use them. Remember the
egg yolks and sugar that we cooked and chilled at the start? You want to whip that together
with some mascarpone this makes a beautiful rich cream and you can flavour it with whatever you
want you could add a dash of liqueur some vanilla a little bit of lemon even and just keep whipping
until you get luscious stiff peaks. Now it's time to plate our dessert ... peel the acetate off the
meringue cylinders place a cookie on the plate and then put the meringue cylinder over the top.
Pipe in some of that mascarpone cream and add a whole cooked strawberry. pipe in a little bit more
mascarpone and then top that with some chopped fresh strawberries and press it down lightly,
don't be too heavy-handed here or you'll crack open that meringue. Add an extra dollop of
mascarpone and spread that out flat. Now carefully place the tuile on top in the
centre you want to choose one that is bigger than the cylinder and you'll see why in a minute. Pipe
on four dollops of mascarpone you want them to be fairly close together but not touching.
Add a little piece of strawberry across all the gaps like a bridge and then at the table pour
into the centre this beautiful strawberry juice that we made right at the start and watch it
flow down through the gaps onto the plate. Look at that. Oh. Ooh it looks very good.
This looks amazing Ann. I like how it like pours out each side. Wow
it is beautiful. Let's crack into it I'm assuming this cracks yep.
Wait I thought this was a marshmallow. Looks like marshmallow but I think it's meringue.
Yum. It's very good it's like a strawberry meringue. It's a poached strawberry in the middle
it's lovely. That's good very sweet but that's yum. I like the cream in the middle. Magnificent!
As much as I like making dessert videos the problem I've found is that since YouTube changed
to the AI algorithm back in 2016 it stopped suggesting desserts down the side with any
regularity. Eighty percent of the videos that people watch are suggested to them by YouTube.
You'd think it would be videos people searched for or even subscribed to but it's not it's what
YouTube suggests to you. Personally I think that eating a delicious dessert like this is
far preferable to uh charcoal ice cream. I have to ask the question: why does the algorithm hate
me? Uh why? And when producing videos for people is your full-time job views are not just a vanity
measure they are whether you get paid for the week or not. With thanks to my patrons for your
amazing support that makes a huge difference and you're encouraging comments are just food
for my soul. Make it a great week by being kind to others and I'll see you on Friday ❤️