On her television show, Martha Stewart has preparedbaked Alaska一个冰淇淋甜点,是仅仅涂满ue and torched, with at least two comedians:Andy SambergandConan O'Brien. For a graduation party, Martha recommends a dessert buffet featuring meringue cups and poached pineapple. Martha made baked Hawaii—basically baked Alaska, but filled with sorbet and shaped like a volcano—with the actress Julie Bowen. Martha made floating islands for David Rockefeller's 91st birthday and he "loved it," Martha said. Martha is so boss that she served meringueto herdentist.
Martha is absolutely obsessed with meringue.
Martha calls meringue "beautiful" over and over and over again. Macarons? You start with"three beautiful egg whites"; they're beautiful because they're from Martha's own chickens, probably. Baked Alaska? "Get this all very covered with this beautiful meringue." Baked Hawaii: "Here's our beautiful fluffy meringue...now we're going to put our beautiful meringue all over." That time Martha ate floating islands at a"very beautiful luncheon"in Jacksonville, Florida, in "somebody's beautiful apartment overlooking the sea"? "It was so beautiful and delicious." Toasted-marshmallow frosting on cupcakes? "Perfectly perfect. Ooh! Oh, so beautiful, look at that."
Well, why not? Meringue has a lot going for it. It has a billowing elegance. Like IRS Form 1040 or Ben Affleck, it looks more complicated than it really is. And though it doesn't taste like much on its own, it can be easily engineered to, in the hands of an artist like Martha Stewart.
Martha is a meringue evangelist. Martha told Maureen Dowd in the 1990s that, if Maureen wanted to be better at domesticity, she needed toinvest in a propane torchfor browning meringue, finishing crème brûlée, and unmolding salmon mousse. Twenty years later, salmon mousse and arguably crème brûlée are over [Ed. note: Say what?]; only meringue remains.
Martha said that her favorite frosting isSwiss meringue buttercream. (This is the correct opinion.) Martha said her favorite cake, "if I had to pick just one cake recipe," is lemon meringue cake. Martha once made an"upside-down lemon meringue pie"wherethe whole crust was meringue. (In truth, it was more like apavlova.)
Martha favors "mile-high" Swiss meringue toppings for her moretraditional lemon meringue pies. Martha called her lemon meringue tart "unbelievably yummy" in a 2008 blog post entitled"My Mother's Day! Come see my photos and please leave a comment."
More darkly, Martha and her longtime love of meringue figured into the investigation into themurder of Laci Peterson, whose husband told police that, on the date in question—December 24—Laci had been watching a Martha Stewart segment on meringues ("some cooking deal, I don't know, cookies of some sort, they were talking about what to do with meringue"). The police requested the tapes not just for December 24 but also December 23, and found that it was in fact December 23 when Martha did meringue, and this came to be seen as evidence that something was fishy. In court proceedings, there was a long line ofquestioning like this:
