Quite a while ago, I was browsing through the food section on guardian.co.uk and chanced upon an interesting recipe by Dan Lepard. I’ve tried a couple of his recipes in the past and have never been disappointed. So I decided to try out the ‘roast pineapple, coconut meringue and rum cream’.

The only ingredient I forgot to put on my shopping list was the cream to make the rum cream so I replaced it with some raspberry sauce as there were some frozen raspberries lying in our freezer waiting to be put to good use.

A very simple recipe with a delicious outcome. Roasting the pineapple takes it to a whole new level. The addition of dessicated coconut to the meringue mix gives it a lovely chewy texture with a nutty flavour almost converting them into coconut macaroons. In fact, in spite of using egg whites from 2 large eggs, there were quite a few meringues left over that we later consumed on their own with coffee, really tasty!

Roasted Pineapple & Coconut Meringues (original recipe can be found here)

Ingredients

For the roasted pineapple –

1 pineapple

50g dark brown sugar

75ml orange juice

a pinch of ground cinnamon, clove and allspice

For the meringues – I halved the quantity of ingredients given in the original recipe

egg whites of 2 large eggs

50 g caster sugar

50g icing sugar

35-40g dessicated coconut

Method

Remove the pineapple’s skin and cut it into quarters, cutting away the core. Put it in a baking tray with the sugar, spices and orange juice. Bake in an oven preheated to 160 degrees Centigrade for an hour. What you get in the end are lovely soft caramelised pieces of pineapple sweetened by the sugar but with a tartness from the orange juice.

To make the meringues, whisk the egg whites until soft peaks form. Add half the caster sugar and whisk again. Add the rest of the caster sugar and whisk until the mix is thick and glossy. Fold in the icing sugar and then the dessicated coconut. Drop spoonfuls of the mix onto a lined baking sheet and bake in an oven preheated to 130 degrees Centigrade for about 1.5 hours.

To make the raspberry sauce, I blended together raspberries (about 200g) with 150g sugar and a little water and a dash of lemon juice (from the David Lebovitz book, ‘Ready for Dessert’). I tried sieving the sauce to remove the seeds, however, I didn’t succeed fully. The result was a richly coloured sauce full of raspberry seeds which still tasted real good 😉

To serve, I sliced the pineapple into smaller pieces, crushed the centre of the meringues, placed a few pineapple slices on each and poured over the raspberry sauce.

Try this as dessert after a lovely dinner or on its own as an accompaniment to coffee. It won’t disappoint 🙂