My Aunt Patti is an incredible baker, bringing melt-in-your mouth cookies, pies, and cakes to every family event. Anel fell deeply in love with her chocolate chip meringue cookies at a tree-trimming weekend in New Hampshire a few weeks ago so I pressed her for the recipe to surprise him last night. Little did I know that an electric mixer would have saved me 40 minutes of beating egg whites with a whisk and my bare hands, leaving me with a sore arm. On the plus side, at least I got some extra cardio over with!

One thing to note is that although I always try to make my food as healthy as possible, this is really just a sugar bomb and there is no escaping that, but it’s the holidays so I’ll forgive myself this time. On the other hand, I did make sure to use organic cage-free eggs, organic cane sugar, real Tahitian vanilla extract, and beet sweetened chocolate chips!

Ingredients:
2 egg whites
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon of vanilla
¾ cup of sugar

Add sugar gradually to the other ingredients and beat until you get soft but firm peaks when you lift up your mixer/whisk. Fold in 1 package of dark chocolate chips. Take a teaspoon and drop one full spoonful of mixture for each cookies on a paper bag spread over a baking sheet. Bake for 25 minutes until you see small cracks in the tops of the cookies. Take out of oven and let sit for 5 minutes and then cool on cookie racks.

For Christmas next week, I’m going to make these again and add in crushed candy canes! Let me know if you have any other fun meringue cookie ideas.

Special thanks to my friend Phil Cohen, a phenomenal New Hampshire-based photographer, for taking this beautiful picture: http://thedailyportsmouth.com/