chamomile meringue cookies

TGIF, team. This entry finds me in a rare moment of flux in my personal journey; as a creature of habit completely devoted to remaining as deeply embedded in my comfort zone as humanly possible, I don't generally stray from routine unless I'm switching jobs, and I mean that. Recently I've adopted a number of healthy habits that are meant to enable me to live more consciously and stop wasting so much fucking time; I'm tired of being a loser permanently stuck on Tier Zero of life.

While the first few days were rocky to say the least, I've somehow managed to steady myself as a burgeoning young adult and make several positive adjustments, and with all of this newfound clarity and insight, I've decided to double-up on aesthetic effort for this week's recipe. One of the positive steps forward I've managed to take is committing myself to drinking a cup of hot, unsweetened chamomile tea right before bed every evening; I've got a bad way about sleeping, usually waking up several times throughout the night, and this is The New Me's way of dealing with it. While I definitely do enjoy the new addition, it doesn't really accomplish the task of keeping me soundly snoozing until the break of dawn; instead of being jolted awake by the soul-rending night terrors I've experienced since childhood, I now tend to be roused by the urge to urinate at approximately the same times, but I can't complain. While objectively the tea has brought about very little change, it's definitely much less stressful this way. I'm no longer a frightened infant haunted by nightmares of certain impending doom; now, I'm just an old man who simply wants to avoid pissing his pj pants. It's a welcome twist on a timeless classic. Today, I want to showcase the power of chamomile in some vegan cookies. This one is going to be a classy one.

one cup of chilled aquafaba

one half of a meyer lemon

one tablespoon of sugar

one pinch of sea salt

one bag of chamomile tea, steeped in one tablespoon of water

I had a jar full of bean water hanging out in the fridge, and I figured it was high time to see what could be done about it. Aquafaba meringue, our old friend. My beautiful white whale.

I'm in a very somber mood this early Friday morning; ever since getting back from tour, the end of the week has become a time of quiet reflection, far from the fast-and-wild weekend lifestyle of yesteryear that I seem to miss less and less as time goes on.

Get the aquafaba and the lemon juice into your mixing bowl and start whipping them the hell up. The more I do this, the less it seems to work, but I'm so happy to report that on this particular day, the meringue took to my beating blades and volumized to a proportion I have not yet had the privilege of witnessing thus far. Remember that initial batch I made, salty as the briny sea? This one ended up even hotter, stickier, and whiter, which was definitely surprising as I had much less aquafaba to contend with this time around. Small blessings.

Once you've achieved some nice, soft tips, stir the sugar and salt into the tea, adding them all at once in liquid form, and keep mixing until you achieve a shiny lacquer; once it stops looking like dry foam and starts looking more like sexy patent leather, you're ready to dump the entire bowl into a trash bag, snip off a corner with a pair of safety scissors, and pipe these bad boys out onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. Just like a real pastry chef.

Here are the squirts, primed, perfect, and ready for hell at 225° Fahrenheit; I stuck them in for a good twenty-five minutes, peeking in periodically at the end to avoid the fate I suffered the first time I tried to do something like this. Lest we forget.

You may be wondering why the first three look a bit less...developed...than their glossy, flatter brethren. I've been toying a lot lately with dietizing various recipes; I was curious about the potential for low-cal, sugar-free meringue puffs, and have been for a while now. As somebody who really hates not knowing things first-hand, I decided to establish a control group of cookies without any seasoning or sugar, just to see whether or not they would firm up properly in the oven.

Overbaked, once again. The funniest part about this photo, however, has to be the fact that the meringue puffs without the sugar didn't just burn more than the others, they completely vaporized under the coil, like they got zapped by an alien or something. Brutal. I love being a scientist.

This was the part I was really excited to show off. In a rare streak of outdoorsmanship, I went on not one, but two hikes this week, and on two different trails, no less. Something I'm very into right now is stealing beautiful flora from the wild. There are probably a lot more rules regulating the theft of plants growing in public here than there are where I'm from, but I'll be damned if that's going to stop me; in the backwoods of Raccoon Township, the pansies belong to the people. I was lucky enough to stumble across some wild rosemary and sage, more fragrant than any I've ever smelled in the past. It was just growing out there, on its own, for free. And here I was, buying them from the man like a chump.

My big reveal; the final presentation, cookies and all, is definitely a bit underwhelming. I had literally spent an hour arranging these dry desert flowers for the final photos and got so into that side of the task that I had completely run out of creative juice when the time to place the centerpiece came along. In a state of desperation I hastily dusted them with a sprinkle of crushed rose petals, but to no avail; they look like the little styrofoam communion wafers that you have to eat in church when god knows you've sinned. I was relying on them to be pretty enough to hold their own, and that's nobody's fault but mine.

Anyway. That's enough of this for now; I've got a postal exam next week I need to cram for, and if all goes according to plan, I'm gonna get to stick my hands into mailboxes all across the tri-county area. Wish me luck. I really need to move the fuck out of my mom's place.