Shaped Thanksgiving Foods- Pumpkin Meringues

Due to scheduling conflicts, I wasn't able to finish my kids crafts in time so we will instead be doing fun Thanksgiving shaped foods this week. Baking has always been a favorite pastime of mine, and while I do plan on showing you all some of my favorite recipes, I also want to try out some new stuff this year.

Today we are making pumpkin spice meringues that I found here, but what I mainly want to do is test out a few different piping tips to see which ones give the best shape. I will be trying some of the standard tips, as well as a handful from my new set of Russian piping tips. I have already been trying them out with various types of frostings and I absolutely love these! I you want to see how fun they are and how they work, check this out.

Supplies:

-five egg whites

-1 cup granulated sugar

-Pinch of Cream of Tartar

-1/2 tsp vanilla extract

-1 tsp pumpkin pie spice

-Orange and green food coloring

-Various piping tips

-Cream cheese icing, optional

For this type of meringue, you want to start by boiling water, and in a bowl above the water you will mix your egg whites, sugar, and cream of tartar, stirring non-stop for 7 minutes. Once the sugar is fully dissolved, transfer to a standing mixer with a whisk attachment. Add vanilla and pumpkin pie spice. Whisk on low, gradually moving to high speed for another 7 minutes, or until stiff peaks form. At this point you can remove 1/4 of the mix to color green for the pumpkin stems. I decided to use green frosting instead so I just added orange food coloring to the whole mixture.

Now it's time to have some fun. I set aside a few different types of pipes to see what they would do. My first tip was one of the swirly ones, but when I piped it, it kind of came out looking like a dumpling. Overall, it looked a little like a pumpkin, but maybe there was one that worked better. The second was a floral shape, and it came out like a blob. It was then that I realized that this was how most of them would turn out. The third one was a tulip shaped tip, and this one came out as a perfect little pumpkin. I decided right then that this was my favorite and that I'm probably gonna have to make a separate batch of these.

The rest of the Russian tips were all blobs. The normal tips weren't any better. One of my star tips made what looked like a traditional meringue, but that wasn't what I was going for. Luckily, I had already found one that I liked so I didn't mind the blobs so much. I baked them at 175* for 2 hours, and then let them set for another 4 hours. I used a little bit of green colored cream cheese frosting to add the stems.

Merengue is tricky, and I feel like there is a possibility that I didn't mix them enough at the beginning and they were too soft to properly pipe. Although, that one tulip style tip did make a very cute little pumpkin shaped meringue, and the dumpling one actually looked alright once it had a stem, but I'm not completely sold on these. As far as festive themed foods goes, there are better ways to go about it. I did enjoy the process though, since I haven't had a chance to bake in a while. They did taste really good, too.