Egg-ceptional Egg-free Easter Meringues!

Easter is egg-season, be it chicken, chocolate, marzipan, or any other kind. For those of us with egg allergies, it can be challenging, but no fear – Aquafaba to the rescue!

I craved meringues for years, knowing that if i were to eat the regular egg white ones I would suffer from itchy skin for days, so, I skipped it for almost two decades… The other day I randomly found a recipe online and decide to test it out, and to my great surprise it actually tastes just as good as I remember from my childhood.

So what is Aquafaba ?

Aquafaba means : Beanwater ! It is literally the water from a can of chickpeas !
That thick stuff that usually is wasted down the drain, now has a great new use !

Let us start !

Ingredients

Water from 1 can of organic unsalted chickpeas ( organic and unsalted, to be sure it is only water, the foam will not come together if there is either salt or preservatives in the water )

150 gr. powdered sugar

A few drops of vanilla extract ( or coconut extract ) to taste

Optional: Food colouring. I used organic food colouring, red cabbage red, carrot juice yellow and spirulina green (I do not recommend carrot juice nor spirulina, explanation follows)

Directions

Pre-heat the oven to 100°C

Sieve the water from the chickpeas into a bowl. Put the chickpeas into a container and save for later use (click here for chick pea salad recipe)

Whisk the bean water until bubbles are small and the surface is silky. About 5 minutes with an electric whisk.

One spoonful at a time, add the vanilla extract and powdered sugar and continue whisking, until all of the sugar is in and the mix is firm enough stay in the bowl, while you turn it upside down.

Optional: Divide into several smaller bowls, one for each colour and add the food colour to each batch. Advice: I do not recommend suing carrot colour as that breaks up the mix leaving you with deflated yellow crumbs instead of lovely fluffy meringues.

Also, if you should choose to use spirulina for colouring, make sure it is the tasteless kind, made for this specific purpose. I took the stuff I usually add to smoothies, which ended up tasting rather seaweed-y (read: like farts) when baked.