Wednesdays Baking ups and downs

So if you saw my post from a few weeks ago (Luck of the Irish) you'd see that my friend Emily responded to my post about spreading the Irish guy and getting something from me. Hence I make her something.....and so I did. Now for those of you who don't know me, I'm NOT domesticated what-so-ever! I hardly cook, bake, sew....nothing! I can cut up fruit, make smoothies and make some really yummy sandwiches, but that's not cooking or baking.

Well I decided to make Emily some Meringues, and South Africans typically LOVE meringues. I thought I was being smart by making something authentic and unique but alas, here in America you guys call meringues... Sea foam! (Surprise attempt failed). While I was making my meringues I had this brilliant idea of making them green (in memory of St Patricks day). The green turned out really good and I thought I was doing a great job with my little attempt to bake until it came to putting the meringue batter on the baking plate. Sandy, Kim's house helper, showed me a cool way of putting the batter in a ziplock bag and squeezing the batter in little circles spiraling up until you tip it off. She first showed me how to do it (yes, I am that retarded when it comes to baking, I wasn't lying) and her meringue looked great. So I did mine like hers which i THOUGHT looked great. Beatrix, my niece, wanted to help dallop the meringues on the plate so I let her. Everything was looking good and ready to bake, so I put it in the oven and baked them.

2 hours later I took the meringues out and found that they tasted really good. I was so proud of my baking achievements. I had actually baked something from SCRATCH! Well a moment later Tristin made the comment "Hm, they kind of look like little dog turds," and sadly enough everyone agreed....as did I. So now I had little green-dog-turdish meringues (that tasted really good). To top it off, my plan was to dip the meringues in chocolate.....yeah, now the turds were brownb AND green. So we all had a good laugh at my meringues (that happened to taste very good, thank you very much) and I gave them to Emily along with some chocolate covered strawberries.

What a fun day for baking!

Here's the Recipe if you ever want to make it yourself. It's really easy:
2 Egg whites
2 TBS boiling water
0.5 tsp vanilla
1 cup Castor Sugar (in the USA i think it's just really fine baking sugar)
1 tsp white vinegar
1tsp baking poweder

Beat eggs until fluffy.
Keep beating and mix in everything else BUT the baking poweder and sugar.
Keep beating and add in sugar slowly.
Fold in baking powder.
Bake @ 100 degrees Celcius (212 degrees Fahrenheit) for one hour
Turn off oven after the hour and leave them in to dry if you want them to be extra crispy

*dip in chocolate if you like*

Oh and if you want to see how our night with Jon and Emily and Natalie went that night, you can see pics and read about it here on their blog! :)