Light Meringue cake with fruits

Pavlova is a meringue cake with a crunchy exterior and a soft interior, which is usually topped with  whipped cream and berries or some fresh fruits. It is soft, light and very delicisous. Pavlova is named after the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, and got this name after her 1920s tour through Australia. Still, it is unclear where the dessert itself originated from: some argue it comes from New Zealand, others say it is Australin and some even say that it comes from the United States. It is a dessert most identified with the summer time, but is eaten all year round in many Australian and New Zealand homes and has become as well very popular in Europe.

I had wanted to make this cake for a long time, but somehow I was afraid of it being too hard. Now that we have moved homes, I have a new oven and it seems that together “we” can master this elegant and fragile cake very well. I hope that you will enjoy my recipe.

Yield: 5-6 portions

Ingredients: 

Meringue

• 5 egg-whites
• 270g powder (caster) sugar (minimum 250g of sugar)
• 1 table spoon white vinegar
• 1 table spoon maizena
• 1 tea spoon vanilla extract

Topping

• 250ml cream
• 1 tea spoon vanilla extract
• 1 table spoon of sugar (if you don’t like your cakes too sweet, you can also skip it)
• 400g of fresh figs
• some mint for the decoration

Step by step: 

• Separate the egg whites from the egg yolks the day before baking the cake. This will make egg-whites more liquid and easier to beat up. Make sure that the egg whites are clean, with no trace of yolks Keep them in the fridge overnight.
• Pre-heat the oven to 125ºC.
• Beat the egg whites till they start to form nice foam, gradually add sugar and keep beating until you get a stiff and glossy meringue. Add white vinegar, vanilla extract, and maizena and mix it all well together.

• Draw a circle on baking paper – ca. 25cm in diameter. Put the meringue in the middle of the circle and smoothen it out to ca. 20cm in diameter, without covering the borders of the circle.

 

• Bake the meringue in the oven for ca. 120 minutes at 125ºC. After that time, turn the oven off, but keep the meringue inside for 3 hours while the oven cools down slowly.
• Meanwhile, beat the cream, the vanilla extract and some sugar (to taste) until you get a stiff whipped cream. Put it on top of the chilled pavlova (which you’ll have already taken out of the oven ) and decorate with clean figs cut in quarters. Serve immediately after decorating . Enjoy!