what to do with extra egg whites

Mark made vanilla bean ice cream on Sunday to complement my free form rustic apple tartlets. He ended up with 6 leftover egg whites, which we couldn't bear to throw out. So what does one do with leftover egg whites?

Meringue cookies, of course. A double batch.

I made these for the first time for our annual Halloween party in the shape of bones. They taste like marshmallow cookies and they dissolve in your mouth in a poof of loveliness.

Beat 3 egg whites with 1/2 tsp. of cream of tartar until they thicken. Add 3/4 c. of sugar and 1 tsp. of vanilla extract gradually on high speed until "stiff [glossy] peaks form." That wording is in a ton of recipes, but I love it when those words come to life on the whisk attachment to my KitchenAid.


Mark and I experimented with different tips from my cake kit (which looks more like a tackle box, but that's another story) to see what shapes we could pipe. We tried to make small swirls. Let me just make clear that piping meringue in small plastic piping bags can get really sticky.


After what I like to call a 2-hour "slow roast" at low heat (225 degrees, which felt like high heat considering it was 92 degrees outside on the day we made them), we got 80 bajillion poofs of loveliness, however uneven they were.


*poof*