3) Chocolate Meringue Cookies (Free Egg Whites!)

I) Meringues. The magic that happens when you whip enough air into egg whites and sugar. They can be eaten like whipped cream, poached into clouds, or baked into cookies. Upon hearing Professor Chugh announce they had leftover meringues from class, I jumped on the offer to take them home and make cookies. Meringues are a foam, suspending air in the protein matrix of the egg white, with sugar helping to make the foam firm.

II) Chocolate Meringue Cookies

Materials:

• 4 egg whites
• 1 cup simple syrup
  
• 1/4 cup hot cocoa mix

Procedures:

1. Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees (Fahrenheit). Beat egg whites with a whisk (adding the simple syrup once a foam begins to form). The egg whites will be ready when they reach the stiff peak stage. You can tell they are ready by taking a whisk full of egg whites and flipping it over, if the whites stand up straight with out tipping over, then they're ready.
2. Once the egg whites are stiff, fold in the hot cocoa mix. Spoon the mixture into a piping bag or a zip top bag.
3. Immediately pipe the meringues on a parchment paper lined baking sheet. And bake for 2.5 hours.

III) Results and Discussion
I've never made meringues before. I'm also not a huge fan of those meringue cookies you get at Trader Joes in the plastic containers, they always reminded me of styrofoam. So for these cookies I decided to pipe them thinner, so that they would make a thinner cookie. This worked, creating a cookie that was crisp almost like a cracker. My roommate bought hot chocolate mix, but he didn't realize it was dark chocolate so he never uses it, this was the perfect way to use it up. And since it was already sweetened I didn't have to alter the meringue. This experiment has sparked my interest in poaching meringues.


IV) Recipe adapted from "Cooking for Geeks"

• Potter, J. (2010). Cooking for geeks: real science, great hacks, and good food (p. 255). O'Reilly.

V)Pictures!