How to Make Pavlova

Hi there and welcome to my kitchen. It’s the Klutzy cook here again and today I’m making Pavlova. Now the side of Pavlova is actually Australia’s best culinary contribution to the world and Pavlova is a lovely meringue dessert that has sort of a marshmallow center and we top it with cream and then fruit and it tastes delicious. It’s actually named after the famous ballerina Anna Pavlova and it really is a fabulous dessert. So today I’m going to make it for you. The first step in making a Pavlova is to actually just get a piece of baking paper and a plate and draw a circle around it. I’m actually making a free from Pavlova so that’s why I’m doing it this way. You can cook it in a pan or whatever you like but I like to do this and then just make my own shape and the trick with Pavlova is let me just put that on a strain here, the higher it is so the deeper it is the more marshmallow in your center. So if you don’t want it be too soft in the middle you can just make it big up and you might get that marshmallow in the middle. Okay, the first step in making the Pavlova is to actually separate six eggs. I need six egg whites in the bowl ready to be whisked and the trick is not to get any of the yolk in because otherwise, your lovely nice stiff meringue paste’s white foam so it’s important not to get any of the egg yolk in there and preferably not any shell like I have which I am going to have to fish out now. Now I’ve got my six egg whites in the bowl then and I’ve got my mixer ready to go so I’m just going to lower the head and get these eggs whisking. So here are the eggs whisking away, I put them in quarter high speed. See the base and it’ll just take a couple of minutes and it’s whipping them into a nice frenzy. So it’s coming to the ends here so I’ll click it off. And as you can see we’ve got a lovely white mix in here now which is almost double or triple the bowl here and you can see there’s paste in the meringue Now what we have to do is whisk in some sugar and my sugar is dissolved fairly well. So here we have the six egg whites whipping away and I’m slowly adding the sugar. A couple of tablespoons at a time which gives each additional chance to dissolve because the truth is you don’t want any granules left in the egg white. You need to have it completely dissolved so you need to give it plenty of time to be incorporated and to dissolve. I’m adding one and a half cups of sugar in total to the six egg whites. Now I’ve added a little sugar. So I’m just going to test how we are going here, see if it’s all dissolved. Look at that. It’s beautiful. Now the tester, I’m just going to get a little bit of this, rub it between my fingers. I can still feel a few granules in that so I’m just going to set it of again and let it go for a little bit longer. Okay we’re just about done here. I’m just going to check again and make sure that the sugar has dissolved which it has. Beautiful and now I just need to add one tablespoon of corn flour and half a teaspoon of white vinegar and whisk that through. Let’s all mend to that so there we have that beautiful meringue ready to go. So now I’m just going to make the Pavlova. Here we have our tray ready to go and I’ll have Stewy helping me now. I’m just going to take the bowl. So we need to scoop that out. We’ll scoop it out together. We’ve got out circle here so we need to just spoon it all out. I’ve just bring the meringue out. Now I just got to bring this around into the shape I want to put my circle roughly outlined and I actually want it a bit hard at the sides. You’ve got paste and you want to make sure you got plenty of the edge. Stewy is helping me now. I’m pretty happy with the shape. It doesn’t matter how it looks. You may have a taste but this does look pretty good, nice and round I made it a little bit make sure it’s a bit lower in the middle so that it does hold your filling. And now it goes into a nice low oven for an hour and 15 minutes roughly. The oven is set at 100 degrees Celsius. So there you go. That’s the Pavlova ready to – okay it’s been an hour and 15 minutes since I’ve put the meringue in the oven so I’m just going to open it up and see. There it is. It’s looking good. It’s beautiful. It’s really lovely and firm. So what I’m going to do now is turn the oven off and actually leave the meringue here to cool. If you take it out there is a tendency that it might split so I’m just going to turn the oven off and leave the door slightly ajar and leave it in there to cool. I’ve taken the Pavlova out of the oven. It’s been in there cooling for about two hours, it’s really nice and cold now. It’s lovely and firm, a little bit sticky on top and it’s going to be just delicious. I’m transporting it to its final destination of icings so I actually assemble it now. I’ll do that when I get to the party but basically I will be putting on a layer of whipped cream on the top and then some fresh fruit. Okay so I’m here at my mother’s place. I’m putting together the Pavlova now so here it has crumbled a little bit on the journey but that’s okay. Now I’ve got a big tub of whipped cream which we spray all over the top as my mother would say the more cream the better. Here’s my mother and she can go – for everybody as you see. So we spread the cream all over the top so that’s the cream and now one of the toppings you can use is fresh fruit which is really nice. So I got a mix of some fresh mangoes, some fresh strawberries and some fresh bananas here so I just place them all over the top of the Pavlova. This is the easy part but you can put whatever you like on the top. Passion fruit is another one that people really enjoy and I must say a little while ago I actually made a Pavlova and had turkey shallots and pistachio nuts on it and I have to tell you guys it was pretty nice. So this is a really gorgeous looking dessert too. We can really be quite creative with what you put on top and I can tell you everyone always loves Pavlova. It’s one of those desserts that everybody enjoys. These mangoes are fresh from the market yesterday and mango are seasoned to start here in Queensland so that’s very exciting and the strawberries are also in season at the moment. They’re really beautiful. Drop on it and the other thing that I have that I’m going to put on top is something different is some of my kiwi fruit jam. So a few of blobs of that on because kiwi fruit is another thing that people often use to decorate Pavlova and this just my jam. It’s basically kiwi fruit, a bit of sugar and some apple so it will go really nicely. So there you go. There is my Pavlova. It’s beautiful and we are really going to enjoy it and I hope you’ve got making one and you enjoy it as well.