Series 6, Episode 4, Spanische Windtorte

Here’s the recipe for Mary Berry’s Spanische Windtorte: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/spanische_windtorte_64745

This recipe uses a total of 12 egg whites. I had a brief think about what I could do with all of those leftover egg yolks but then remembered that you can buy cartons of egg whites from the supermarket, so that’s what I did!

The baking trays I have aren’t big enough to put 2 x 20 cm circles on so I needed to batch bake the first circles and hoops. This meant that it took an extra 45 minutes to get everything baked. Here are some of my hoops:

The next step was to build up the meringue into a cake shape with a hole in the middle. Here’s how that looked:

I don’t think the meringue was quite thick enough because it was a bit drippy. It seemed to hold in place quite well though. I then spent about 3 days making the Swiss meringue over heat because it took so long to get up to temperature. I don’t think it quite got up to 70ºC in the end but I’d decided it was enough. I then piped this into pretty patterns as beautifully described in the recipe. I didn’t quite have enough to cover the lid in a pretty pattern but I tried the best with what I had.

I spent most of the time while the meringues were in the oven making the fondant flowers. In total I had to make 104 balls to make 13 flowers. I coloured white shop bought icing rather than buying 3 different colours.

Whipping up the cream and adding the fruit was the easiest big and here’s the end result:

The meringue was pretty much stuck to the plate because part of it was baked on the plate, this meant that it was pretty difficult to serve it and didn’t look as pretty in the bowl. It tasted like Eton mess and I couldn’t tell the difference between the two different meringue types. It was a lot of effort to make something that looks pretty… but it would have taken 2 minutes to make something taste the same using shop bought meringue instead.

Lily

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