Day Sixteen Part Deux: Vous les vous... um... something

So I'm a bazillion years late with the results and recipes and whatnots. Let's not dwell, yeah?

So, I was attempting to make a dessert that echoes the flavours of coffee and beignets. I sort of succeeded.

Since beignets are fried, I wasn't going to get the crispy outside without using something OTHER than the EBO. Traditional beignets are basically square, fried donut type things, and you can't really fry in the Easy Bake. But, I tried to get a sweet dough that would turn into a sweet, bready "crust" type thing with maybe a little bit of crunch by loosely following this recipe, which is basically a yeastless version of the dough, or a petit choux dough, minus the cooking it on the stove. Confused yet?

What I ended up with was:
1/3 C of all purpose flour
2 1/2 T Sugar
1 egg
1 T softened butter

I mixed the flour and sugar together, then made a little well in the middle, cracked the egg into it, and incorporated it until the dough just came together. Then, I mixed in the softened butter. I smooshed about half the dough into the bottom of the buttered tart pan...


...and baked it for about 10 minutes.


The meringue was pretty easy to put together, using this recipe as inspiration. I couldn't find a recipe that used brewed coffee, but just as if the food sample gods realized I would need a little help, I received a sample of Starbucks Via in the mail today.

The recipe I used was:
1 egg white
1 pinch of cream of tartar
2 T sugar
1 tsp Starbucks Via instant coffee

I basically just followed the directions in the recipe to make the meringue, and then piped it onto the "beignet" crust and put it back into the EBO.



It was in there for about 10 minutes when I started to wonder exactly how hot it's supposed to get inside an EBO. I looked it up and discovered that the temperature when the oven is fully pre-heated can be between 325 and 375. So, at 15 minutes I pulled the dessert out of the main oven and put it into the warming chamber. My digital meat thermometer told me the temp inside the warming chamber was about 170-ish, which is much closer to the 200 - 250 degrees I saw in pretty much every meringue recipe I read. So, I left the dessert in there for about another 15 minutes.



Forgive the fingerprints on top. That's from me sticking my fingers on top to check for doneness.

The crust turned out kind of like a cookie. It wasn't as sweet as I thought, which is a good thing. In terms of tasting like a beignet... eh. Maybe a little. Enough for the purposes of this experiment, but I'd definitely like to try this recipe again to make the real deal.

The meringue was kind of soft, but still... umm... meringue-y? It tasted really good, and the coffee flavour definitely came through, but because the EBO doesn't really allow for tall desserts it really was a pretty thin layer. Maybe one day when I have a couple hours to kill, I'll make more meringue and let it sit in the warming chamber until it dries out and does what it's spozed to in a much larger dollop.

I will definitely use this recipe to make meringue cookies, though.

And that, folks, is the slightly anti-climactic Day Sixteen dessert recipe. Worth the trouble, but worth the wait? You be the judge.