Here's How To Give Your Meringue A Fall Twist With Pumpkin

Come fall, the internet is flooded with pumpkin recipes; soups, cakes, muffins, breads, and, of course, pumpkin spice lattes. While the classics are great, sometimes they can get a little stale and have you looking for a more unique way to enjoy this festive flavor. We've got the refresh your fall dessert recipes need: pumpkin meringue. You can add pumpkin puree and pumpkin pie spice to a meringue base, which can be baked and eaten on its own or added to your existing fall favorites for even more pumpkin flavor and the best fluffy texture.

Meringue is a versatile dessert item consisting of egg whites and sugar whipped into stiff peaks, sometimes with the addition of cream of tartar, salt, or vinegar. This fluffy base can be flavored with extracts (think vanilla, lavender, almond, etc.), freeze-dried fruit, cocoa, spices, and now, pumpkin. It can then be dolloped and baked to make crunchy meringue cookies, topped on a cake and torched, baked into pavlova and filled with fruit, folded into cake batters to add volume, and added to buttercream for the fluffiest frosting — we meant it when we said it's versatile!

There are multiple methods of making meringue, namely Italian, Swiss, and French. The method you use to make it will determine how you consume it. French meringue uses raw egg white, so it needs to be cooked in some way before being it's eaten. Italian meringue uses a hot sugar syrup and Swiss meringue uses a boiling water bath to cook the egg whites, so these two types can be eaten as is.

In the case of a French meringue, a tablespoon of pumpkin puree and 1/4 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice can be gently folded into a meringue batter consisting of 2 egg whites and 1/2 cup of sugar after it's been beaten to the point of stiff peaks.

Pumpkin spice meringue cookies sound pretty fantastic to us, but there are many more uses for pumpkin meringue. Pumpkin pavlova (meringue baked into a bowl shape) filled with baked apples would be the ultimate combo of fall flavors and textures. Instead of whipped cream or ice cream on top of your pumpkin pie (or in addition to!), top it with the meringue and torch it for an extra pumpkin-y, roasted marshmallow-y version. To elevate your go-to fall dessert recipes, try mixing pumpkin Swiss meringue into a buttercream frosting to use for fall cakes or folding the meringue into the batter for fluffy pumpkin muffins.