Maca meringues

When left to my own devices for the day, I seldom do more than cook and write, interjected with spurts of yoga to wildy inappropriate music (dubstep yoga anyone?) and perhaps a spot of meditation once I'm feeling a bit frazzled. It was on a day like this that I, faced with a couple of egg whites left over from this mayonnaise recipe, decided to make meringues. Not just any old meringues though, I wanted to make them a little bit special, as you do: to put my own Zuza stamp on the whole meringue genre. I settled on adding a tablespoon of ground maca powder, for a malty, creamy kind of vibe

 Ingredients

2 egg whites

Pinch of salt

75g caster sugar

1/2 teaspoon good vanilla essence

1 tablespoon maca powder

Beat the egg whites with the pinch of salt until they form soft, snowy peaks. Add the sugar, maca and vanilla essence and carry on beating until the peaks turn caramel. Pour little blobs of the mixture onto a greased baking-papered tray and bake in a pre-heated oven at 180 degrees Celsius for just 5min. Now, the secret to crunchy-on-the-outside-and-soft-and-chewy on the inside meringues: turn the oven off and leave the meringues in there to cool for 2-3 hours. And that's how you get sinfully tasty maca meringues. I polished them all off in under 48 hours. I did attempt to give some away, yet somehow, I completely forgot