LOW CARB MERINGUES
4 egg whites
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
18 teaspoons spoonable Truvia *
Put the egg whites, vanilla and salt in a large metal bowl. Beat with an electric mixer on MEDIUM speed until foamy. Gradually beat in the Truvia. Increase the speed to HIGH and beat until the mixture is very thick. This may take about 10 minutes. With real sugar the mixture will end up like marshmallow fluff but you won't get that consistency with Truvia. You do want the mixture to be thick enough though.
Drop the meringue mixture by large spoonfuls on a large parchment paper lined baking sheet. I wanted to make 20 meringues so I started by spooning 20 smaller mounds and then divided the remaining mixture among them to make them all roughly the same size. Bake at 300º for 30 minutes or until they are crisp.
Makes 20 meringues
* This is the equivalent of 1 cup of real sugar.
I found out that you can't make meringues using Truvia. They came out at least as bad as they do with Splenda. Apparently erythritol doesn't behave the same as real sugar in cooking/baking. I could tell as I was beating the egg white mixture that the texture wasn't going to be right so I added the equivalent of another 1/2 cup of Truvia in hopes that it would fix it. It didn't really help much though. The consistency never got like marshmallow fluff like it does with sugar meringues. It got really stiff and fluffy but more like stiffly beaten egg whites that you would fold into a souffle rather than marshmallow. I was afraid that if I didn't add more Truvia, the egg whites would end up getting "dry". With real sugar the egg whites would never get too dry. They just get stickier and more like marshmallow the more you beat them. In the end the recipe doesn't work at all anyway as you can see from the photo.
I baked them for 30 minutes and they shrunk down to nothing (maybe 1/3 the original size) and came out very brown. Real meringues never shrink during baking. When I took them out of the oven they were very soft and spongy. However, after just a minute or so at room temperature and they suddenly got very crispy on the outside. The inside was still soft though and they were much too sweet because the meringue had become compressed. This was the first time that I've experienced the cooling effect of erythritol. Even though they were still warm from the oven, the meringues tasted cold in my mouth. Not just cool, but actually cold. Needless to say, they went in the trash. It's a shame because Truvia is pretty expensive and I used a lot of it. I'm sure that I'll find other uses for the rest of the Truvia though. I'll just use it in much smaller amounts from now on.
