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Dessert

Champignons Meringues

Meringue mushrooms are sweet, airy confections shaped like mushroom tops and stalks, dusted with icing sugar and coated in chocolate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and chocolate are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,404 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Champignons Meringues

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the meringue

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Whip the egg whites with a pinch of salt until very stiff.

  3. Gently mix in the caster sugar without overworking the egg whites.

  4. Fill a piping bag with a plain tip about ½ inch in diameter.

Pipe and dry

  1. Pipe small rounds onto a greased baking tin for mushroom tops.

  2. Dust with icing sugar and dry in the oven for 3-4 hours.

  3. Use a smaller piping tip to pipe shapes for the stalks and dust with icing sugar.

  4. Dry the stalks in the same way as the tops.

Assemble and finish

  1. Make a small hole in the center of the tops with a knife.

  2. Fill the hole with royal icing.

  3. Brush the bottom of the tops with raw egg white and dip in grated chocolate.

  4. Brush the flat part with raw egg white and dip in powdered chocolate.

  5. Attach the stalks to the tops and serve on a basket with spun sugar or decorative leaves.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Egg + chocolatetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptenal (green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped into a stable foam that gives the meringue its structure and crisp set.
Caster sugar
Stabilises the whipped foam and helps the meringue dry to a crisp, sweet shell.
Raw egg white
Acts as a sticky glue that holds the chocolate coating and the stalks to the meringue.

The step that matters

Gently mix in the caster sugar. Overworking the whipped egg whites deflates the foam. Adding sugar gently and stopping once glossy keeps the meringue stiff enough to hold its piped shape and dry crisp.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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