Meringue icing problems

Since I am Miss Light Bakery, and sadly, a sugar fiend, I make a lot of cake.

Lately, I've been playing around with Italian meringue icings, seven-minutes and White Mountains. (I gotta admit, so far they really don't satisfy my icing jones. They're too sweet, and don't have enough body. But anyway.)

In pictures, I see layer cakes with these things. But whenever I've put them into layer cakes, they collapse in the middle, leaving nothing but a sticky syrup between the layers. Is this normal? I've no idea; I grew up with cream icings, and as far as I know have never had a meringue icing other than mine. It happens with both types: sugar syrup, or stovetop double boiler.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I use my thermometer; I heat everything to the recommended temperatures; I beat until cool; I read Rose Levy Berenbaum. Are there some secret tips for this? Or do food stylists simply cut layer cakes with meringue icings twenty seconds after assembly?

 

Not unless the recipe directions are lying to me; the two I'm thinking of say quite specifically, "spread x cups of frosting on first layer; top with second layer." (I just made one of the recipes in question from an issue of Cooking Light. It wasn't a howling success overall, for non-frosting related reasons -- but yeah, the frosting goes in the middle. They have a big cover photograph of the luscious coconut cake, thick with frosting in the middle! Not only that, but they instruct one to "chill the cake" before serving! Grr...)

I had sort of thoughts of using Shirley Corriher's meringue stabilizer (a heated cornstarch solution) but I don't know if that would work in conjunction with an Italian-type or cooked meringue. (My kitchen, my chem lab.) I just wondered if it was something I was doing wrong... but really, I don't see how a frail, delicate little meringue could hold up a whole cake layer. (Especially of that coconut cake, which was dense and moist.) MAYBE angel-food cake or genoise sponge or something... but not a regular scratch cake.

 

Chilling... hm, that could work. I know my layers were completely ROOM temperature cold, but really cold might be better. It always holds up really beautifully outside, yes. Swirls and peaks and all. Anna, it's not meringue buttercream (Butter! Perish the thought! ) it's just a meringue, soft and cooked either by the addition of the hot syrup or by cooking over a double boiler. (White Mountain and seven-minutes are pretty much the same sort of thing. The seven-minute is the double boiler kind, so-called -- of course -- because it takes about seven minutes to get to the right temperature while whipping.) So it's a lot sweeter than the buttercream would be, because of course you can't mess too much with the sugar or it won't "meringue."

It all works out wonderfully: whites beat up, volume increases when syrup is added, temperature is all good according to my little digital thermometer, I haven't given myself third-degree syrup burns... Then I put it together and it falls down. (Not that that's necessarily a bad thing -- I mean, I like trifle a lot, so I'm a fan of soaked cake -- but it's not so pretty when cut for company!) I'm interested to note that the Lady Baltimore frosting holds up better.

Danno, will the gelatin thing still work when adding hot sugar syrup as for an Italian meringue? (It should, shouldn't it. Whoa. That would be pretty much a marshmallow cream I'd be making there, wouldn't it? Coooool.) How many spoonfuls of regular powdered unflavoured I-can't-get-that-fancy-stuff would be in a sheet?

 

What's a chiboust?

So meringue powder would work? (Duh! of course it would!) What ratio would you use? And how prepare it, to make that sort of fluffy frosting? I make a sort of low-fat "buttercream" using meringue powder, so I have it around the house...

I cook my syrup to 248°, wheak it right off and beat it in. I've been comparing recipes, though, and there's quite a difference. Lots of books say 238° (including Joy of Cooking); Berenbaum says if you go over 250° you'll cook the whites and wreck the meringue. Spice Cookbook and a couple of oldish cookbooks I've got say 250°. Regan Daley says in Sweet Kitchen that she doesn't beat the eggs to peaks, just a foam. Then she pours in syrup at 238° -- but what she describes as her result sounds quite different: she says it gets very very thick and sticky, and if left too long, hardens up too much to spread. Might try that and see what she means.

Yes, I looooove those cakes with hard meringue in the middle. They're a whole different thing though. There was a coffee shop round here (which just closed -- unfortunately? Fortunately?) that served a wonderful cake called Caramel Crunch: disks of nut meringue with whipped cream and really thick caramel between the layers. Oo. I went there far too often. :lips: I want to try making a slightly less devastating clone of that one of these days, but I can't figure out the caramel yet; it's thick and sort of "fudgy" in texture, not like regular caramel sauce, but piped in scribbles anyway.

 

Aha! Chiboust, then, is what Alice Medrich calls "the new mousses" in her Chocolate & the Art of Low Fat Desserts! Then I have made some already. (Plus flubbed one completely, too.)

 

That was how I flubbed my first one: changing size of recipe AND subbing agar for gelatine. Nothing like overambition, is there? (I wonder why I can't seem to find a nice, consistent chart or something for using agar? Maybe because it is not always standard?) It was good frozen, though. Or so I'm told. My husband and a bunch of his friends ate the whole thing.

I think I know now what the "caramel" is in that caramel cake. I bought a nifty little "real" Mexican cookbook on the weekend, and I was reading it last night — from the 'fifties, written in Spanish and English, extremely interesting. Think it's Dulce de Leche, or something similar. I didn't recognise it without all the Haagen-Dazs yogourt around it...