Make it the night before. That's the best part.
A meringata is a meringue cake — a large disc or two of meringue sandwiched with cream and whatever fruit is best right now, assembled and left in the fridge overnight so everything softens together into something that has no business being this good.
Almond meringue with strawberries. Make it the night before.
Ingredients
Meringue
- 4 egg whites
- 220g cane sugar
- 1 teaspoon white wine vinegar
- 1 teaspoon cornflour
- 50g flaked almonds
Filling
- 3 tablespoons Tutto Sicilia Almond Cream
- 400ml double cream
- 2 tablespoons powdered sugar
- 300g strawberries, hulled and sliced
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 250°F. Draw two 22cm circles on baking paper.
- In the mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, whisk egg whites to stiff peaks. Gradually add sugar, vinegar and cornflour, whisking until just glossy.
- Mound meringue in the size of your serving dish or into the two circles. Scatter flaked almonds over both. Bake for 90 minutes until dry and crisp. Turn oven off and leave inside to cool completely — several hours or overnight.
- Whip cream and powdered sugar to soft peaks. Fold in room temperature almond cream gently — you want it rippled through, not fully combined.
- Place the meringue disc on a serving plate. Spread with most of the cream. Layer with most of the strawberries.
- Spread remaining cream. Scatter remaining strawberries & almonds.
- Refrigerate overnight. The meringue will soften slightly. This is exactly what you want.
Nonna's Notes
Leftover egg whites from another recipe? She turned them into something magical.
The almond cream goes into the whipped cream layer, which turns it into something much more interesting than plain cream. It becomes fragrant, slightly dense, deeply nutty — not sweet in the way a flavouring would be, but genuinely almond-tasting in the way only real almond cream from real Sicilian almonds can be.
The strawberries collapse slightly overnight. The meringue softens at the edges where it meets the cream. The whole thing settles into a kind of perfect Sunday afternoon dessert that you pull out of the fridge looking like you've been planning it for days.
You have. One day. That's enough.
This is the kind of dessert that changes a Sunday afternoon into a memory. The almond cream is what makes it Sicilian. Everything else is just structure.
