Meringue bones with plum jam

How scary can be to eat a broken bone with some blood on it? Enough to create a spooky (and healthy) snack for your kids!!

The merengue recipe comes from my best friend Francesca’s mom, grandma Tina. Every time I go to visit them, grandma Tina is in the kitchen cooking amazing dishes like it’s always Christmas 😉 There is always a fresh baked cake for the kids to enjoy and 90% of the ingredients come from their garden and animals. Last time I was there she was preparing some meringues for her nieces and she gave me the recipe to try…so simple and so perfect! Thank you grandma Tina, you’re the best!!!

Being Halloween time I decided to use the recipe to create some scary shapes…like bones, but you can use the meringue recipe every day of the year and shape them in any design you like!

Here you are the ingredients to fill a baking tray with meringues (I prepared 20 bones):

How to proceed:

Divide (very well) the egg white from the yolk. If you do not know what to do with the yolks, what about a custard cream? or a homemade mayonnaise? or a homemade lemon curd? just some ideas for you.

Place the egg whites in a bowl, add a pinch of salt and using an electric beater beat the egg yolks in snow. It will take less than 4 minutes. They will be done when you will have obtained a thick and firm cream and the egg white mix will stay still on the electric beater without falling (see picture).

Add 1 teaspoon of lemon juice to avoid any egg flavor in the final meringue.

Using the electric beater slowly add the sugar. Mix for 2 minutes up until obtaining a shiny sticky mousse.

Transfer the mousse in a plastic bag and cut one corner

On a non stick baking sheet (you can use a parchment paper on top if you have a standard baking sheet) start creating the bones, one next to the other. I started making two circles one next to the other and a vertical line. Other two circles on top and my cute bone was done!

Place the bones in the preheated oven at 250F / 120C  for 2 hours.  We are not technically baking but dehydrating the meringues. As I used brown sugar the meringues came out beige and not bright white, still spooky!

Final touch: I heated some homemade plum jam to make it more liquid and I let some drops fall on top of the bones creating a blood effect. My kids were extremely excited about it!!!

Enjoy!