The trail has gone cold...

For years there have been rumours that some vegan somewhere was churning out flawless vegan meringues but we never got any closer than meeting people who knew people who lived next door to someone who's penfriend had once made some...but then a very kind friend on Twitter sent us a link to a recipe with some highly-believable photos...but on the other hand we also believed a film of Bigfoot we saw on YouTube in which he ran past in wellies...

Anyhoo we were very excited and bought ourselves some pectin and tanked up on icing sugar, mustered the children and got started.

Bless them, the children were wildly excited even though at 8, 7 and 4 they are lifelong vegans and have never even seen a meringue!

We were a bit worried about our pectin as we had bought liquid and the recipe said dry and we read all sorts of dire warnings on the internet about not using the kind specified in the recipe, but in the end we figured that this was particularly to do with jam-making and the point in the recipe (before or after boiling) that the pectin is added.

So we mixed the egg replacer and sugar and vanilla and water and pectin and beat it and beat it and beat it and beat it and then plopped it in rows on baking sheets and put it in the oven. It had something of the 'right' flavour about it which was probaby helped by a fraction of the sugar being soft brown sugar but the texture seemed a bit liquid so we kept some back and added more sugar to try and stiffen it in the way that adding more sugar to glace icing would stiffen it but for some reason it got even sloppier so we stopped adding sugar and put that in the oven too.

They had got quite golden brown after an hour and so we got them out and tried them....

So anyway, they definitely weren't meringues but they were definitely...something!...they were like a kind of slightly puffy biscuit...in fact even though I've never actually had one before, I would venture to say that WE MADE MACAROONS!!!..but as to meringues...we have no new leads.... 

D'oh...we're going to admit we didn't make these ones on the right and credit someone called Keven Law for the photo...and possibly the macaroons....?