Left Over Pavlova

 Individual Strawberry Pavlova

Pavlova is an Aussie favourite dessert and as we often have foreign guests, it is a regular coming out of my kitchen  on a weekend evening. They always love the crispy outer coating and mallowy inside, and with summer berries, or kiwi fruit and passion fruit topping, it often has our friends and homestay students pulling out the camera for a picture of this Aussie icon!

It is also a tasty use for the left over egg whites that I seem to amass when making delicious ice cream custard. Today I jumped on the "individual" portion bandwagon and made mini pavlovas for us and our 2 students.

The trouble I face when using different batches of left over egg whites is that I never seem to have enough, or have too many for the recipes and none of my recipes seem to have a proportion of sugar to egg white. So I thought I'd give some different quantities in my pavlova recipe here:

Aussie Pavlova
4 Egg whites
200g Caster sugar (for 5 egg whites: 220g caster sugar, for 6 egg whites: 250g caster sugar)
2 tsp corn flour
1 tsp vanilla essence

• Pre heat oven to 100º;
• Line a baking tray with baking paper;
• Whisk egg whites till they form hard peaks and the bowl can be turned upside down without the egg whites moving;
• Slowly add the caster sugar spoon at a time;
• When sugar is combined and mixture is glossy, add corn flour and vanilla essence
• For individual pavlovas, split mixture into 4 rounds on baking tray and cook in the preheated oven for 35 mins. For a large pavlova, scoop the mixture on to the lined tray and cook for 1 hour - 1 hour 20 mins for a large one.
• Leave the pavlova to cool in the oven with the door open for a few hours till the oven is completely cold. Close the door and leave till cool. 
• Serve with whipped cream and decorate with fruit.