I recently made a quick batch of blender Hollandaise sauce using a recipe a blog friend shared with me and had two egg whites to play with. So I made the ‘easy’ version of ‘brutti ma buoni’.
Pavlovas, vanilla pine nut ‘brutti ma buoni’ and chocolate almond ‘brutti ma buoni’
I left out the cocoa powder. Instead, I added a tablespoon of vanilla sugar for flavour. And for nuts, I toasted pine nuts and chopped them up coarsely. I took the egg whites out of the fridge and let them sit at room temperature for about half an hour, and added the sugar a tablespoon at the time, but had trouble getting the sugar to dissolve so I stirred in the nuts and baked them off anyway.
Rather than getting my usual glossy looking meringues, they were dull and gritty looking after baking.
The taste was still good though. I only added nuts to half the meringue while baking the rest plain. I loved the moist centers of the plain meringues … they turned out more like pavlovas but the vanilla ‘brutti ma buoni’ were tasty. I preferred them to the chocolate version, to be honest.
Inside the vanilla ‘brutti ma buoni’
Cooking is Fun ... Really!! 
I love a good meringue cookie. It’s too humid for meringue baking here right now, so I’ll have to pass on these beauties.
It hasn’t been bad here lately. But it’s not July yet. Oh wait … yes it is. 🙂