Having my Meringue Moment ✨

Nibbles & Bites: Issue #9: Lemon Meringue Tea cake 🍋

Pastry chefs everywhere will note that meringue is having a big moment. I love how meringue decorations add both maximalist design and playful whimsical touches to any baked good. Meringue is as light as air and takes on color well, making it the perfect medium for swirled and spiked decorations. This simple combination of whipped egg whites and sugar can be torched or baked atop cakes, cookies, croissants or even ice cream, and makes any sweet treat more sculptural.

Before we dive into my lemon meringue tea cake recipe, I want to take a brief moment to explore the different types of meringue that pastry chefs rely on to create their work. There are three basic types of meringue: French, Swiss and Italian meringue. They all are a mixture of sugar and beaten egg whites - however, these methods require different techniques that result in different levels of stability.

The most common meringue is a French meringue, where the egg whites are whipped with sugar until stiff peaks are formed. This version of meringue is the least stable because neither the eggs nor the sugar are cooked. If you’re looking for more stability, an Italian meringue might be the right meringue for you. With an Italian meringue, sugar and water are combined and heated on the stove to 245 degrees, resulting in a thick hot syrup which is then slowly streamed into egg whites as they’re vigorously beaten into stiff peaks. 

Finally, there is Swiss meringue, which I used for my lemon meringue tea cake recipe. This method combines the egg whites and sugar in a double boiler. The mixture is then heated until about 175 degrees, until the sugar has melted and the eggs have heated through. The mixture is then placed in the bowl of an electric mixer and whipped on high speed until stiff peaks form. The result is a super glossy and smooth meringue that is very stable because the eggs and sugar have both been cooked.

For this recipe, I decided to combine elements of a classic lemon meringue pie, which usually is topped with clouds of wobbly meringue and then torched with a classic lemon tea cake. In my recipe, the meringue is equally as whimsical and sculptural, however it bakes at a lower oven temperature for over an hour, resulting in a beautiful bronzed tone, crispy and crackly pieces of meringue, and expressive peaks and valleys. The entire tea cake emerges from the oven looking beautifully varnished, and the exterior texture is shattered on the outside, with a pillowy and chewy texture on the inside. The humble lemon loaf comes out of the oven looking sort of fanciful and otherworldly.