too cheap to buy a/ pastry bag so my meringues/ look like little turds, -_____-;;;

While surfing allrecipes.com for something to do with my leftover celery, I chanced upon the front page picture of brightly colored meringues. M and I had been talking about lemon meringue pie, although she hadn't made any nor had made any invitations to taste any (>___<, :p), so I scanned the recipe and got it stuck in my mind that I should made meringue cookies.

By hand.

Yes, I am crazy.

Long story short, the worst part of the meringue-making wasn't the beating the egg/sugar mixture by hand (which, while certainly difficult, provided me with ample exercise for my biceps, :p). In fact, mixing was fairly simple (although not quite easy, especially as it came towards the end and trying to get stiff peaks by hand....[THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID!!! hur hur hur *gets slapped*])

No, the worst part of the whole deal was (refraining from the that's-what-she-said-jokes given that I 1) had no one to share them with, being alone in my apt, and 2) had no one to share them with, as neither B nor E consider me worthy of being on good speaking terms with, apparently [woe and angst and terrible emo poetry]) having to scoop the meringue into something so that I could squirt it onto the baking sheet to be put into the oven.

Everyone online wrote that electronic mixers are almost essentially REQUIRED to make proper meringues (YEAH, WELL I SHOWED THEM, HA!), but I really do beg to differ. The most important piece of equipment for making meringues is a proper pastry bag.

I'd seen one in Safeway when I popped in to get cream of tartare and parchment paper, but had brushed it off as a silly expense.....little did I know.....

The recipe, I hashed together from various sources and from various bits of advice gathered from the internets, but it goes something like this:

• 3 room-temperature egg whites
• 1/4 cream of tartare (although the original equation was 1/8 teaspoon CoT per egg white)
• 3/4 cup and 1 tablespoon of powdered sugar (adapted from the original suggestion of either 1 3/4 [WHICH WAS SOOOO MUCH SUGAR, so I decided not to use that suggestion] or 2 tablespoons per egg white [which, at 6 tablespoons of sugar, would definitely not have been enough])
• Clean, oil-free, dry bowl of any of the following: ceramic, glass, metal. NO PLASTIC.

-----

1. Mix eggs until foamy.
2. Add cream of tartare. Mix until forms soft peaks.
3. Add sugar 1 tablespoon at a time. Mix until forms stiff peaks
4. Spoon into pastry bag
5. Squirt onto parchment-paper-lined baking sheet
6. Bake at 200 F for 1.5 hrs.
7. Turn off oven. Open oven door slightly. Leave in warm oven for another hour.

My problems made themselves quite clear starting at step 4. First I tried to make a parchment paper cone (or several), like I saw online, but the meringue mix proved itself too thick to properly settle to the bottom of the cone, so that it sat more at the top and squeezed itself right back out....the wrong end, -____-.

So next I tried the popular spoon-it-into-a-ziploc-baggie-cut-off-a-tiny-corner-and-use-that-as-a-pastry-bag idea.

It went from bad to worse. First, the spoon kept nudging the edges, so that even when I sealed the Ziploc, there was meringue outside the Ziploc seal.

The first few meringues turned out okay, but as I turned to refill the bag with more meringue mix, it started getting ALL OVER THE PLACE.

When I tried to squeeze the meringue out of the tip, it decided to ooze out the top instead, and all over my hands.

Then the tip decided to give under pressure and so I ended up getting squiggles all over the place.

Since I was trying to still maintain them in some sort of circular shape, then ended up being squiggles on top of each other, in a round-ish shape.

Once I got sick of getting it all over my hands, I just used the spoon and my fingers to blob them onto the baking sheet. I can't even begin to imagine what those would be described as.....

Once they were stuck in the oven and came out nicely tanned, they came off the parchment paper wonderfully.

.......they just looked like little turds is all.....

-_________-;;;;

(p.s. or at least most of them did......)

In any event, I know how to make meringue cookies now.....it's more a matter of getting them to look like meringue cookies that I will need to be working on, :)