Soft peaks need not apply...

I had heard about a product that is liquid egg white which sounded ideal for making macaroons and meringues and I was keeping an eye out for it everywhere I went for a while.  When I finally saw it one day in a Waitrose near me I had to buy it purely because I had been looking for it for so long.  It then sat in the fridge for a while and is due to go out of date fairly soon.  Given the number of times I banged on about it to my husband, I feared for the state of our marriage if I didn't use it and simply threw it away. After the last time I made macaroons I was not in a hurry to try that again so it had to be meringue.  The problem with meringue is they tend to go best with cream toppings and I need to avoid cream where possible so I had to get a bit more creative than your bog standard pavlova.  Once again Nigella came to my rescue with a recipe for a chocolate meringue stack.  The meringue came out pretty much as expected but I didn't much fancy making the creme patissiere in the recipe, not least because my snazzy find meant I didn't have any egg yolks left over.  After what must be far too long for any one man to endure, I finally gave my husband a break when I stumbled across another Nigella recipe for chocolate peanut butter sauce that should usually adorn an ice cream sundae.  It's now drizzled over my three layers of chocolate meringue and again my shoddy photography skills don't come near to showcasing all its glory.  I really need a new camera. And also a cake stand rather than improvising with a plate and upturned bowl. A few more sweet treats like this and I reckon him indoors might cave and let me have one.  

I also knocked up eighteen mini pavlovas to go in the freezer and use up the rest of the egg white.  They came out a bit misshapen and really only good to be broken into pieces in desserts but that's good enough for me.
After a horrible week, a few days of following someone else's recipes to create something delicious was definitely what I needed.  Hopefully I'll have more energy to be a bit more creative soon.