Pavlova with Lemon Curd & Berries

Sorry for the radio silence, folks! I was so sick all week last week, then Passover, a family function on Sunday, and the lack of sleep have just about knocked me out. And it’s only Tuesday! I meant to post about this over a week ago but never got around to it . . .

I made this Pavlova from Gourmet magazine on the Saturday before Passover, intending to test it for a possible Passover dessert. Let’s back up a second: Last year I bought a Passover cake from Dean & Deluca, assuming that a fancy grocery store in NYC would be able to provide a decent cake for the holiday. It was some sort of almond thing, and cost a fortune, and turned out to be just shy of gross. When I saw more than half the cake left over (and that was with 20 people eating dessert!) pathetically at the end of the day, I swore that this year I was going to make something instead of buying it. I spent about half of March thinking about what I would make, and kept dog-earing pages in magazines when I saw recipes I thought might work.

Fast-forward to this Pavlova: When I saw it in Gourmet, I thought it was perfect! I’d never heard of a Pavlova before so I knew it would be interesting for everyone to try, and I liked that it seemed light and included fruit (it’s a pretty heavy meal, a light dessert usually goes over well!) And it was almost Kosher For Passover! It calls for cornstarch and vinegar, but having made meringues plenty of times growing up, I knew I could leave out the vinegar and was planning to substitute potato starch for the cornstarch. My plan was to make it following the recipe first, then if I liked it I would make just the meringue again with the substitutions.

The recipe was quite easy, actually, and came together in no time (it does call for some resting time, read through everything before you start or you may run out of time!). I was surprised to find out how THICK the meringue was, the picture in the magazine made me think the meringue part would be more like a pie crust so when I saw that it was over an inch thick, I thought I’d done something wrong! See what I mean?

They have you draw a 7″ circle on the parchment paper to use as a guide (brilliant, btw!), and after I started filling in the circle I panicked when I saw how full it was, and went back to the recipe to see if maybe it said 7″ radius and not 7″ diameter as I’d drawn — yeah, it doesn’t say either radius OR diameter, it just says “7-inch circle.” I take that to mean 7″ diameter, what do you guys think?

In any case, I set up the meringue the way you see above and popped it in the oven. After letting it cool for an hour like the recipe instructs, I opened the oven and almost cried when I saw the meringue had broken!

Then I remembered that this was a dress rehearsal!

Making the lemon curd was kind of annoying, and I didn’t much like the taste of it after it was all said and done. Were I to make this again in the future I would probably substitute with ready-made lemon curd and save the step completely. Piling the fruit on top and slicing a piece off was definitely the best part of this dessert! It comes out so pretty!

Unfortunately I didn’t really like the taste of this as much as I liked its looks. Something about that lemon curd was off, and I couldn’t get past it even though the meringue was amazing. The bottom of the meringue gets a marshmallow-like texture that I absolutely did not expect, and that goes really well with the crispy-crumbly edges. My taste-testers (Adam and a friend whom I lured over with the promise of dessert-tasting) really liked it, but the whole thing didn’t really do it for me. It also became soggy after less than 30 minutes, and I realized that a dessert that I have to assemble at someone else’s house after the seder isn’t really very practical . . . so I ended up making something else.

But I’m saving that for another post. Stay tuned!