Pavlova Take Two!

This post could also be titled "Guess Who Loves Their Hand Mixer?" Now that I have a proper one whipping up my meringue to this level of thickness took a fraction of the time it took when I did it by hand.

My first attempt didn't pile at all into a cake shape, this time it looked sooo good. I decided to do a test of some smaller pavlovas too.

Fluffy pillows of sugary goodness. 

After about an hour and 1/4 they were all puffed up and golden, but I can see I need to work on an issue with the meringue weeping. 

Also I think the dip in the middle is supposed to be smaller so they don't collapse when they cool. 

 I managed to slightly over whip the cream because I forgot how much more powerful the hand mixer is than my arm. It still tasted very yummy though. This is one of the small ones ready to go.

 Here you can see the delicious layer of sponge meringue. My favourite part.

The big one got a bit deformed, but had a really perfect thick sponge part. 

The finished big cake and it's sea of blueberries. 

 Since this round I've done some reading into tips for pavlova and discovered two conflicting reports about what it's supposed to look like. While this was baking Tom got all flustered about it going brown and after reading I found an Aussie site that warned against this saying that you don't want it to get too discoloured or too crispy on the outside. However I also found a recipe based on a pavlova someone had in England that says you are supposed to have a crispy brown shell around the meringue. Having never seen a pavlova baked by someone other than me, I'm at a bit of a disadvantage on this one. So I'm going to attempt the non- brown ones next.