Put on your shoulder pads and whip out your lip liner – it’s meringue roulade, again. In the 80s and 90s, my feisty granny ran a catering company which (to quote), “did everyone’s wedding in the whole of Hampshire”. Which means that everyone was eating poached salmon with hollandaise, meringue roulade and granny’s surprise ice-cream for two decades. My mother and aunt were roped in to help, and mum made countless roulades when she was pregnant – the hours spent tending to meringues in the Kenwood mixer meant that the whirring racket was my sister’s and my womb music, and, she thinks, is the reason we both like cooking.
Meringue roulade remained on the menu throughout my childhood and was whipped up for birthdays, dinner parties and Christmases until my sister and I could take it no more and bullied her out of it. Making it for the first time myself at Ballymaloe rekindled a lot of memories, and my love of roulade.
So here is my lemon meringue roulade, dedicated to my mum, Mrs. D. Here is her fool-proof recipe.
I couldn’t post this without including Pixie’s amazing meringue creation… sublime.
