End-of-January Update

This week, I made my first experiment: meringue cookies. I only made one batch, but I should have made more, for reasons which will become apparent. Meringue has two main ingredients: sugar and egg whites. Therefore, I had to substitute fully half of the recipe. I had read a few articles that said that the packing liquid from a can of chickpeas works well as a frothy egg replacer, so that is what I used. I used approximately the same volume of "aquafaba" as I would to egg whites, and added 1/4 cup of sugar for each. I whipped the mixture for several minutes. It became frothy, but did not stiffen enough to make structurally sound cookies. I added 1/4 teaspoon of cream of tartar (a stiffener) for good measure, but it did not do much. Then I realized the conversion ratio for aquafaba is more like 3 Tbps per egg, and added more. When that didn't work, I added more sugar. In the end, the mixture stayed stiff enough to make cookies that looked like cookies and not a puddle, but not airy enough to be proper meringue.

From this experiment, I learned that I really must make multiple batches to compare results. Also, I learned to triple-check the directions before beginning. In future, any questions I have about tweaking amounts of ingredients will defer to recipe commentors, who have already experienced making the recipe and tend to offer good advice. My meringues were not successful (they did not have the required "fluffiness"), but they did taste quite good (although, being mainly sugar, this is not unexpected). For next week, I will be a little less ambitious and bake a simple cake. If that cake is successful, I will attempt to make a lava cake. But first, I should probably finish these meringues...