Orange and Clove Italian Meringues Made from the Left over syrup of Heston's Christmas Pudding Recipe

Whilst everyone is raving about Heston's pudding - it would seem that we are all going to have to make our own puddings for ourselves this year as waitrose has sold out of the iconic pudding! Here Rose Prince makes a fabulous version of it from The Telegraph. So I had a go at making my own. At the end of candying the oranges I was left with over 750ml of the most glorious orange and cinnamon syrup. As part of this recipe book I decided to combine the principle of this pudding with my grandmothers recipe.. but really .. what to do with leftover sugar.. well here you go ... this one will end up in the book!

Ingredients

300ml of orange Syrup left over from the Christmas Pudding.

6 egg whites

120g caster sugar

Preheat the oven 100°C/gas 1/4

Method

1 Heat the syrup in a pan to just below boiling. In a clean bowl whisk the egg whites until they are fluffy. 3 to 4 minutes should do. Once they are fluffy and white and form soft peaks. Don’t stop the beating here, just slowly add a tablespoon at a time of the sugar syrup until it is all dissolved.

2 Then add the sugar - gently does it because tipping it all in at once knocks the air out of the eggs. Stopping beating the eggs means you knock the air out as you restart beating them. So a flow of continuous beating gets the best results.

3 Dollop the mixture onto greaseproof paper and bake for 2 hours.

Turn the oven off and leave in the oven allowing them to cool.

Keep in an air tight container

Alternatively you could use this for a baked Alaska recipe..

Waste not want not my grandmother would have said!