Chocolate Chip Meringue Cookies

Chocolate Week (in honor of Valentine’s Day this Friday) continues today with Chocolate Chip Meringue Cookies!

These meringue cookies are not your traditional cookie.  They’re, as titled, a sort of meringue which is egg white and sugar.  So in the same family, if you will, as macaroons and one of my Aussie favorites: pavlovas.  Generally, they’re incredibly sugar-laden.  While these aren’t heavy on the sugar, they are soooo delicious.  As they were baking, Dan said it smelled like pancakes and syrup.  We couldn’t wait to get our hands on them.

Whipping egg whites. Left to right: at start, after 2 minutes, after 5 minutes.

They are slightly crisp around the outside and then softer and chewy inside and I adore them.  I didn’t intend to make such a light, airy, low-cal treat but hey, that’s how they turned out.

All you need to do is whip up your egg whites to what’s called a “stiff peak stage”.  This means when you lift the beaters, the egg whites stand tall, in stiff peaks (as pictured below).

It is possible to over-whip the egg whites, so be sure and check every now and then to see if you’re there.  With my beaters on med-high speed for 2 minutes then high for 2-3 more minutes, they were there.

I used a 2-tablespoon-size ice cream scooper to transfer the batter to the cookie sheet.  If you don’t have one, simply use a tablespoon measure and drop two scoops per cookie.  I used the back of the scoop to then push the cookies out a little wider, around 3-4 inches.  I got 12 cookies (4 rows of 3 cookies) per sheet.  I arranged two racks in my oven in the upper and lower third of the oven and baked both trays at the same time.  After they came out and cooled, the cookies peeled right off the parchment paper.  They were best (and held that crispiness best) the day of baking.  After storing in an air-tight container for a few days they lost their crispness and were chewy.