Description
Delight your holiday celebrations with these light and airy Christmas Meringue Cookies, flavored with a refreshing peppermint touch and decorated with festive red and green colors. Perfectly crisp and melt-in-your-mouth, these cookies are baked at a low temperature to achieve the ideal texture and stored easily for up to a week.
Ingredients
Scale
Meringue Base
- 4 egg whites room temperature
- 1 Tablespoon white vinegar
- 1 Tablespoon cornstarch
- 1 cup caster sugar
- ¾ teaspoon peppermint extract
Decoration
- red gel food coloring
- green gel food coloring
Instructions
- Prepare Egg Whites: Beat egg whites on high speed until they become foamy, which should take about 30 seconds.
- Add Stabilizers: Add white vinegar and cornstarch to the foamy egg whites and continue beating until soft peaks form, about one minute.
- Incorporate Sugar and Flavor: Slowly add caster sugar in a steady stream while beating. Then add peppermint extract and continue beating for about 4 minutes until stiff peaks form.
- Prepare Piping Bag: Draw lines on the inside of a pastry bag fitted with a star tip using red gel food coloring. Fill half of the meringue mixture into the bag and pipe one-inch star-shaped cookies onto a parchment-lined baking sheet.
- Repeat with Green Coloring: Clean or use another pastry bag, draw lines with green gel food coloring, fill with the remaining meringue mixture, and pipe the same-sized star cookies onto another parchment-lined sheet.
- Bake Cookies: Place the baking sheets in a 200 degree Fahrenheit oven for about 80 minutes. After 80 minutes, turn the oven off and leave the cookies inside for 4 hours or overnight to dry completely.
- Store Properly: Once completely cool, store the meringue cookies in an airtight container for up to one week to maintain their crispness.
Notes
- Don’t add the sugar too soon. Wait until the egg whites look nice and foamy before adding in the sugar to ensure the meringue fluffs properly.
- Carefully separate the yolks from the whites; any yolk presence will prevent stiff peaks and a proper meringue structure.
- Check your oven temperature carefully; the cookies require very low heat to dry rather than bake, so an oven that runs hot can compromise texture.
- Meringue cookies are best eaten within a few hours after baking, though they stay good up to a week if stored airtight.
- Caster sugar is essential; if unavailable, pulse regular granulated sugar in a food processor until finer, but do not use powdered sugar as it will alter the texture.
Nutrition
- Serving Size: 1 cookie
- Calories: 15 kcal
- Sugar: 2.5 g
- Sodium: 5 mg
- Fat: 0 g
- Saturated Fat: 0 g
- Unsaturated Fat: 0 g
- Trans Fat: 0 g
- Carbohydrates: 3.5 g
- Fiber: 0 g
- Protein: 0.3 g
- Cholesterol: 0 mg
