Rainbow Meringue Kisses

You will need the following equipments to try this recipe:

• Wilton Tip No 4B or a Star nozzle.
• Large Piping bag.
• Baking Trays / Cookie Tray for baking.
• Tray Liners.
• Small Paint Brush (The kind you use for water colour paintings with a long handle)

Recipe (This will yield around 50 meringue kisses):

• Egg Whites of four large eggs.
• Sugar ( Twice the weight of the four egg whites ) [ Better use Superfine Sugar as it dissolves much easier.Please bare in mind this is not icing sugar. If you can't find superfine sugar you can blitz your regular sugar in a food processor for few seconds and you can get that finely ground sugar we want. ]
• Vanilla Extract 1 tsp
• Some food colourings (Colours used here are: Magenta, Orange, Teal, Purple, Yellow and Green. Please avoid using liquid food colourings as it is bit messy and doesn't give the vibrant colour we are after here)

Method:

Pre heat the oven for 100 degrees Celsius (212 F).

Meringue Mixture:

1. Beat the egg whites till it forms soft peaks (Make sure the whisk and the bowl you are using to beat the egg whites are dry and not greasy. Wiping the bowl and the whisk with a bit of vinegar could help to make them non-greasy).
2. Add the sugar table spoon at a time to the egg white mixture while continuously beating the mixture (Don't add all the sugar at once  as it will cause the egg whites to loose all the air we have Incorporated by the beating process).
3. After incorporating all the sugar beat the mixture for another 5 minutes and add the Vanilla extract to the mixture.
4. At this point mixture will have a smooth silky texture with stiff peaks.
5. Check the mixture to feel any sugar grains (You can easily do this by rubbing a tiny bit of the mixture between your finger tips), if you can still feel any sugar grains keep beating the mixture for another two to three minutes.
6. Fill the piping bag with the mixture (Please see below for how to create the rainbow effect within the piping bag) and twist it from the top so you can squeeze it without having to worry about the mixture coming out from top.
7. Prepare the baking trays with tray liners and start piping your meringue kisses leaving at least one inch gap between each meringue, once this is done bake them in the preheated oven for about 35 - 40 minutes, when they are ready they should come out of the baking sheet easily without sticking and should be chewy in the middle.

Quick Tip 1: When piping your meringue kisses in step 7, you can get a perfect meringue kiss by holding the piping bag vertically and about 1 inch above the baking tray. When the desired size of the meringue has reached quickly pull away the piping bag which will form the perfect meringue kiss.

Quick Tip 2: You can use little blobs of the meringue mixture to stick the tray liners to the baking trays. This will make sure the tray liners still in place specially if you are using a fan assisted oven)

Creating the Rainbow Effect:

• Place the nozzle tip into the piping bag and lay it on a table.
• Then carefully paint about 1cm thick line of food colouring starting from the tip of the piping bag about three quarter the way up. 
• Repeat the process for all the colours you are using.