Cocoa almond meringues

Don't you just love meringues?  They are like ballerina tutus or fairy princess skirts that melt in the mouth.  This week's Tuesday with Dorie challenge is the more robust, masculine, cocoa almond meringue, selected by Mike of  Ugly Food For An Ugly Dude. In fact, Dorie describes these meringues as resembling rocks in appearance, although they still have that wonderful melt in your mouth quality of the more dainty variety.

These are delightfully chocolatey, and tasted good even when they were not quite ready to come out of the oven (I tried one at the end of an hour's baking time and it was still quite wet in the middle).  The baking requirements for this challenge were a little complicated for me because my oven (a) does not work below 160 degrees Celsius; and (b) does not cope with more than one tray in at a time.  To get over (b), I made massive meringues (I had 9 to Dorie's 30).  Tackling (a) was a little more difficult, and I ended up baking the meringues at 160 degrees the whole time instead of starting hotter and switching down.  Even then, my meringues took a good hour and a half to bake properly.

These meringues were well worth the trouble though - they were absolutely delicious, and disappeared so quickly that I am sure that there cannot be any calories in them.

Thanks to Mike for this week's pick - he will have the recipe, or check out Dorie's book, Baking From My Home To Yours.  And to check out what the other members of TWD thought of these  meringues, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.