When thinking about traditional American desserts, macaroons and meringues don’t usually come to mind. Most people don’t even know what these scrumptious creations are let alone how to make them. These traditional french desserts have a base of egg whites and sugar.

The most common method to making meringues is adding vanilla, or almond flavoring. Wanting to explore new flavors and types of macaroons and meringues, heading to pinterest yet again. Lets just say there wasn’t any disappointment.

The important thing to think about when making these desserts is you cannot get any yoke in with the egg whites otherwise they will not form a stiff peak which is key in making these magnificent treats. One difficult thing I ran into when making all these treats is that timing is key, but once I got the hang of it there was no problem.

Starting out with the chocolate mint meringues, all that was needed were eggwhites. corn starch. granulated sugar and of course, mint extract. First, I started with whipping the egg whites with an electric mixer,

Once the egg whites get foamy, the cornstarch was added to help thicken the mixture. Then I slowly added the sugar in a steady stream. After adding the mint extract(and food coloring if desired), I kept mixing until stiff peaks formed. This process did take a while but your mixer needs to be on high for the peaks to form.

Once it was all ready, I spooned the mixture into a large pastry bag with a star tip for design. I ended up piping about one inch “stars” onto the parchment paper and it made about 60 cookies. As soon as the cookies were all cooled off I melted milk chocolate and dipped each meringue into it.

The next dessert I made was the Vanilla Meringues. This was probably the easiest to make out of all five recipes and my personal favorite. I followed all of the same steps as in the mint meringues, but substituted the mint and green food coloring for vanilla flavoring. To add a little pizzazz to the meringues, I topped them with sprinkles and they turned out wonderful.

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To finish off the meringues I found a mocha chocolate chip recipe. This was a little different than the other two recipes. To achieve the coffee flavor I needed to boil one tablespoon of water with one teaspoon of instant coffee and add that to the mixture.

This recipe also called for whole chocolate chips to be added to the mixture. Once the meringue was forming stiff peaks I added the chocolate chips, folding them into the mixture. This part is crucial because if you fold or mix the chips in too much the meringue will loose the peaks.

Instead of using a pastry bag to pipe these meringues out, I used two spoons like you would for cookie dough. The finished cookie was amazing. I felt as though I was drinking coffee in cookie form.

As it came time to make the macaroons the base of the mixture was pretty much the same. One thing that was mostly different about these is the recipe called for almond flour. This ingredient was important because it helped the cookies rise and form their shape.

I started with the Neapolitan macaroons. The recipe asked for strawberry powder but I was unable to find that at the store so I used strawberry jello mix which worked out perfectly. To mix the chocolate flavoring all that was needed was unsweetened cocoa powder.

After all the ingredients were mixed together I grabbed two pastry bags and piped about 1 inch rounds onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. After all the mixture was on the sheets I put in the oven. While the cookies were in the oven I started the buttercream frosting.

In this particular recipe it called for plain vanilla buttercream but there’s no reason you can’t add some flavor to the mix yourself. Some macaroons call for ganache filling, it just depends on the kind of macaroon you are planning to make.

Buttercream is a very simple recipe to make. It contains butter, powdered sugar, milk and vanilla mixed together to form one magnificent filling (or topping in some cases). Once the cookies came out of the oven  let them sit on a flat surface for about a half hour to let them cool. As soon as they were ready I started piping the frosting on all the chocolate macaroons and then took the strawberry cookies and paired the two together.

All the recipes were simple to make and I recommend them for a light dessert(Plus no calories in the vanilla meringues).