Welcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon ... when we were in Paris last year
we visited lots of pastry shops and then there was one that we just stumbled
across that I'd never heard of called Aux Merveilleux de Fred.
I hope that I pronounced that correctly. It's a a beautiful little boutique shop that
specializes in meringues covered in creams and different toppings. They
come in various sizes and we purchased one of each flavor in the smallest size
so that I could taste them and, well, we all tested them, we shared them out
between us, and so that I could recreate them once I got home. So let me show you
what's inside ... each one had two meringues with cream in the center and the
toppings pressed on on the outside. So let's start by making a meringue and for
that all we need is egg whites and sugar and all the recipe quantities for this
will be listed on the howtocookthat.net website for you and there's a link to
that below. Whip together the sugar and the egg whites on high speed until they
become thick and glossy and white and when you lift up the mixer it should
hold its shape like this. Decide how big you want your meringues to be and draw
some circles on some baking paper and then what we want to do is flip the
baking paper over so the circles on the underside so don't get any of that
pencil on our meringues. Pipe one tray of flat circles ... if you have little spikes
sticking up like this just use a damp finger to smooth it down so they don't
burn in the oven. Then on another tray pipe domes of meringue and you do that
just by holding the bag in the middle of the circle and letting it get to the
right width and then just lifting it up and keep piping to make the dome and
then just smooth down the top with a damp finger like you did before and then
we want to bake those at a hundred degrees centigrade or 210 Fahrenheit for
90 minutes. While they're baking let's make our toppings ... the easiest ones to
make is the chocolate of course. You just take a block of chocolate and a potato
peeler and scrape it along the side of the block and you get these beautiful
chocolate shavings and you're going to need 1 bowl of dark
chocolate and 1 bowl of white chocolate shavings. Three of the other flavors have
crispy meringue on the outside so we'll make another batch of meringue but this
time with a slightly higher sugar content so it makes a crunchier meringue.
Whip it up like you did before and then pipe half of it onto baking paper in
long thin lines ... we're going to chop these up so don't worry if they don't
look pretty I'm just making them thin so they'll dry out quicker in the oven.
split the remaining meringue into two bowls and then in one cup here I have 1
teaspoon of coffee and I'm adding to that one tablespoon of boiling water and
I'm just gonna let that dissolve and in the other cup I have some cherry juice
from tinned cherries. That's 3 tablespoons in there and you'll want to
take that and microwave it until it evaporates and boils down to only 1
tablespoon, so what we've done is we've concentrated the cherry flavor in there.
I used all the coffee in my meringue but if I was making it again I'd probably
use half the amount because it was a little bit strong. Mix that through and
then if the meringue is a little bit runny like mine, just give it another whisk
and it will thicken up. It won't be as thick as it would be without any added
liquid but it should be thick enough to pipe onto the baking paper in stripes
just like we did with the plain meringue. Mix in a tablespoon of the concentrated
cherry juice into the other bowl of meringue and add a little bit of red
food coloring if you want as well and then pipe that out onto baking paper too
and we want to bake all of those in the oven at a hundred degrees C for about 60
minutes. At first when you pull those out there may seem a little soft but if you
wait about ten seconds for them to start to cool you'll see they'll crisp up
really quickly and then you can just break them into little pieces or you can
chop them with a knife. How small you chop them is up to you. Now you want to
store these in an airtight container until you're ready to use them so they
don't go soft. It looks a bit like I'm chopping veggies but these are not at
all healthy for you. The last topping that we need to make is a
crunchy nut praline, you can just buy this in some countries but I can't seem
to find it here so I always just make my own. You put two cups of sugar and 1/3 of
a cup of water in a pan over high heat and once it starts to boil wash down any
sugar crystals off the side of the pan using a wet pastry brush. If you don't
have a pastry brush I have used wet paper towel here before. The important
thing is that there's no sugar crystals left on the side of the pan. while that's
boiling place some almonds on some baking paper on a tray in the oven to
warm up. Keep an eye on the boiling sugar mixture and once it starts to turn
golden take the nuts out of the oven and pour about half of that over your nuts.
Having the tray and nuts warm gives you about 30 seconds to mix it around and
make sure that all the nuts are coated before it starts to set. Spread it out in
a single layer and leave it to cool. Return the remaining caramel to the heat
and add in a tablespoon of butter and half a cup of cream. The cold cream will
set the caramel but keep stirring and as that cream gets hot that caramel will
remelt. Give it a good stir to make sure it's all mixed in and then remove
it from the heat and pour it into a heat proof bowl and just leave that to cool.
Peel the almond candy off the baking paper and chop that into small pieces.
They used hazelnuts in Paris but I couldn't find any hazelnuts at the shops
so I'm just going with almonds for mine. Now for the cream ... I'm using 600
milliliters of cream that is 35% fat and then adding to that 200 milliliters
of double cream. Now this double cream is 56% fat so overall that works out that
my cream will end up being about 40% fat .... so more creamy and less watery than
normal whipped cream which will make it slightly thicker and easier to spread on
the meringue. For the assembly take one of your flat base meringues
and add some cream on to it. Add one of the domed meringues on top of that and
gently squeeze it together and then spread it up and around the sides and on
the top. Now for our first flavour you just drop that into the white chocolate
shavings and gently press that in on all sides and then you just put it into a
mini cupcake case to make it easy to move it around. Now do the same for the
praline coated one, that one also just has a plain cream on the inside. You
could sweeten the cream but the sweetness of the meringue and the
praline it really doesn't need more sugar if anything you could add a little
pinch of salt to your cream here to balance it out a bit. Now for the caramel
one add a dollop of that caramel onto the meringue and then add the cream and
another meringue and spread it up the sides and then drop that into the plain
meringue pieces and roll it around until it's covered. Moving on to our flavored
creams ... add a tablespoon of cooled concentrated cherry juice to some of the
cream and gently fold that through. Add the cherry cream between the two
meringues and over the outside. Now it probably would have been a good idea to
add some red food coloring to this cream too but I didn't do that ... that would just
give you more of a sort of a pinky red overall look to it once you've rolled it
into these cherry flavored meringue pieces so that all the spaces are the
same color as the meringue. Just pick that up and pop it into a cupcake case
now for the coffee cream add a tablespoon of icing sugar and then take
a quarter of a teaspoon of instant coffee and crush it into a fine powder
just using the blade of a knife against the counter. Pick up that powder and
place it in with the cream and then just whisk that together. Spread the coffee
cream onto the two meringues just like we did for all our other flavors and
then cover that in bits of coffee meringue.
For the next one flavor some cream using chocolate spread it over the meringues
and then dip it into the dark chocolate flakes. These are the flavor combinations
that they used at or Aux Merveilleux de Fred but you can of course make your own
combinations. What do you think would go well with meringues? You can also make
this slightly bigger to make them less fiddly or as a large cake if you just
make three disks of meringue put cream in between the layers and all over the
outside and then press the topping of your choice onto that. Subscribe to How
To Cook That for more cakes, chocolate and desserts. Click here for more recipes.
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