These little marvels were discovered by me in Adriano Zumbo’s recipe book “The Zumbo Files”. What makes them a total revelation is the freeze dried fruit powder.  This is folded into the meringue mixture, and not only does it give the meringues their colour, it also gives them an intense fruit flavour.

These one’s are blackcurrant, but freeze dried fruit powder comes in many flavours including Orange, Lemon, Mango, Kiwi, Strawberry and Raspberry which are the most commonly available, but as you can see from this website there are many others.

They are absolutely delicious, colour and flavour your meringues with completely natural ingredients and the possibilities they give for dialling up the flavour in meringue desserts are legion.  I suspect they will be featuring sooner rather than later.

The Recipe

Ingredients

• 100g egg white (about 4 eggs)
• 100g caster sugar
• 100g icing sugar
• 30g freeze dried fruit powder (blackcurrant in this instance)

The Method

• Heat your oven to 80C/60C fan
• Line 2 baking sheets with baking parchment or silicone parchment
• Sift the icing sugar and fruit powder together into a bowl
• Make sure your egg whites are at room temperature and put them in a mixing bowl
• Whisk them until stiff
• Carry on whisking whilst you add the caster sugar one spoon at a time
• Whisk until the meringue is thick and glossy and stands in stiff peaks
• Carefully fold in the fruit powder and icing sugar until fully combined
• Put the meringue into a piping bag
• Pipe out your meringues
• Bake (well really dry out) in the oven until crisp
  • NOTE: this takes around 2 hours – and you need to open the oven door to let out the moisture.
  • Don’t be tempted to ramp the temperature up as this will cause the meringues to split (because the moisture tries to escape the mix too quickly) and lose colour
• Allow to cool
• Store in an airtight container until ready to use