A White Christmas

My friend John has a penchant for white food.

Mashed potatoes, vanilla icecream, whipped cream, tapioca pudding. If it's pale and mushy, you can count him in. If it's sweet, even better. I was staying with John and his partner Richard (two of my all-time favourite people) in New York over the Christmas holiday, and my parents flew over from New Zealand to see me. Mum is a master of making this iconic New Zealand dessert called a pavlova - a white dessert! - so I thought I would take the opportunity to learn how it's done.

Pavlova is a meringue cake; it's kind of crunchy on the outside and has a marshmallowy centre. The whole thing is covered in whipped cream, and normally you would put a tart fruit on top (say, kiwifruit or strawberries) to offset the sweetness. For my friend John though, fruit of any kind would only serve as a blemish on the horizon of this vast white landscape of cake, so I made mine au naturel. Back home, a pavlova is always made in summer because winter is too damp to sustain decent egg-whippy volume. You want your beaten eggwhites BIG, like Lynn of Tawa's hair (that was an in-joke for the kiwis). Anyway, here in the States the winters are much drier so feel free to try this out right now.

The pavlova was of course named after the ballerina Anna Pavlova, who toured to New Zealand and Australia in 1926. There is no evidence to suggest she ever ate the dessert named in her honour. I have read that she was rather fond of roast beef sandwiches, so perhaps dessert was not her thing. In any case, here we have it:

3 egg whites
1 teaspoon vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 cup castor sugar
3 teaspoons cornflour

• Preheat oven to 150°C (or 300°F).
• Beat egg whites until the form stiff peaks. Use an electric beater because otherwise your arm will drop off.
• Stiff peaks a-go? Ok. Add castor sugar very gradually while still beating. This should take about ten minutes all up, and the end result should be smooth and glossy. Mine sort of looked like a Mikala Dwyer sculpture, it was just gorgeous.
• Slowly beat and add vinegar, vanilla and cornflour.
• All mixed in? Ok. Spoon it out onto cooking paper on a tray. It should be a pile of sludgy white glory about the diameter of a dinner plate.
• Bake for 45 minutes, then open the door and leave to cool in the oven.
• Whip your cream, pile it onto top, decorate with fruit and there you have it.

It doesn't keep long, which isn't normally a problem. John devoured about three slices of the stuff in one sitting, which I think is a stunning endorsement for this pav. Try it out sometime this year - it can be one of your new year resolutions. What do you think, my little pumpkins?

Love, Doris