Meringue is a Beautiful Thing

There are many wonderful cookies in this world. I should know; I've baked and eaten a good majority of them. Cookies are perhaps the most perfect expression of baked good-ness. They're more often than not the simplest things to bake, they go from mere epicurean thought to finished product in next to no time and they have so many possibilities for experimentation. Needless to say, I truly love cookies.

Also, I love meringue. Equally pliable, fast (well, except for the baking time, sometimes) and delicious, meringue in all its glorious permutations is a favorite in my household. Now given my professed love for cookies and sweetened and beaten egg whites, it makes sense that I would occasionally combine the two and make meringue cookies. I like to flavor meringue cookies with almond extract, but that's just me. You can use anything you like: vanilla, lemon, chocolate chips...whatever. My favorite characteristic of these cookies, however, is the fact that they can be piped into any shape you desire. I, in fact, recently made bone shaped cookies. That's right...bone shaped. I assure you there was a reason for this decidedly odd shape. It was a present for a friend who had recently undergone surgery. Slightly, bizarre, I know but what can I say...it was a longstanding joke. The point is meringue cookies are pretty much culinary clay...they can be shaped into anything you'd like, even something as strange as a bone.

-Rachel L.