sneak peak

tomorrow night is our annual mushroom dinner.  i always try to have some fun when we have special dinners, especially when it revolves around a specific ingredient.  5 courses featuring mushrooms.  though not usual in dessert, there are some avenues that can be taken to achieve a well balanced and meaningful finale to meal using funghi.  candy caps are the easiest to use and because our forager brings so many to us at this time, that is my weapon of choice.  the beautiful thing about candy cap mushrooms is that when dried they take on such a wonderful maple syrup aroma....which leads to the avenue we are rolling down.  

as always i try to bring something conceptual to the table.  so how about diving into the past with some meringue mushrooms.  but to one-up those old classic (and boring, honestly) meringues i made some maple meringues with "blis" maple syrup and a dusting of dried candy cap powder.

tomorrow the rest of the dish will be fullfilled...but here's the recipe.  taking a cue from elBulli and their honey meringues, i substituted maple syrup for honey and added a touch of dried egg whites for stability.  the beauty of this recipe is that there is about half the sugar that a traditional meringue has and so it gets very light and airy without being cloyingly sweet.

200g maple syrup

200g  egg whites

6g egg white powder

50g  sugar

with immersion blender, blend syrup, whites, and dehydrated whites, whip in mixer until stiff, add sugar and whip for another couple of minutes, pipe and dry in oven at low temp.