Old Fashioned Desserts I - Chocolate Meringue Gateau

I've wanted to do a series of posts on old fashioned desserts for a long time. These are the desserts of my childhood, the sweet dishes I grew up with, the puddings that firmly established my sweet tooth (or, more accurately, teeth). These are the recipes turned out by my grandmother - a consummate cook and formidable hostess, she was the first person to introduce me to really great food and to the art of cooking. I would spend hours cooking with her while her ancient Kenwood mixer churned some concoction, its sound thundering in my ears and reverberating through the kitchen. She taught me the difference between beating and folding, how to separate eggs, how to weigh out ingredients accurately using those old fashioned scales which require one to balance ingredients with weights and the importance of patience in the kitchen.

This chocolate meringue gateau is actually not one of my grandmother's recipes, but for me (and, I suspect, for many of my Sri Lankan friends), this is one of those desserts that evoke a sense of nostalgia for the carefree days of our childhood, and the familiar comfort of home-cooked meals at our grandparents' homes. Even the name is deliciously old-fashioned, harking back to a time when every dessert was a "gateau", "pudding" or "torte".  Despite its name, this is not a complicated dessert - it is comprised, simply, of layers of crisp meringue and moussey chocolate cream topped with the obligatory chopped cashew nuts creating the perfect balance of textures. Of course, the chocolate meringue gateau has not yet been relegated to the realms of memory - it is still available freely in Colombo in the form of Mrs G's towering block or The Cake Factory's more modern, deconstructed version. I love them both, which is why I've never made my own, but here we are under lockdown for 8 weeks and counting, and it seemed as good a time as any to give it a try.

My main complaint with the chocolate meringues available for purchase is that the meringue tends to be too sweet, dry and crumbly. The chocolate mousse is rich, so an overly sweet meringue takes it over the top, even for a die-hard chocolate meringue devotee like me. For my home-made version, I used my foolproof meringue recipe, baked in flat layers until crisp and dry. I used the same chocolate filling as my chocolate biscuit pudding recipe to sandwich the meringue layers et voila - Chocolate meringue gateau!

This turned out beautifully, but I found that my meringue layers softened over time - the pudding was still delicious but, after the first day, lacked the textural contrasts of the original. I'll need to do some tinkering with the meringue for next time, to achieve a balance between a meringue that will hold its crunch for a couple of days and one that is not too sweet. An encouraging start!