Can I Make Individual Chocolate Meringue Truffle Cakes?

Our answer

Nigella's Chocolate Meringue Truffle Cake (from FEAST has a disc of chocolate-flavoured meringue that is topped with a chocolate truffle mixture. The truffle mixture is a ganache, made with chocolate and cream and flavoured with alcohol. Usually Nigella makes this in a springform pan, as it is easy to remove the cake from this type of pan. You can probably make the cake in individual portions. However, please do remember that the cake is extremely rich and some people may find individual portions to be too filling, depending on the size of the dishes.

The main issues are how to prevent the meringue from sticking to the heatproof glass and how long to bake the meringue for, especially as heatproof glass will tend to heat up and cool down more slowly than a metal pan. If you are worried about the meringue sticking then you should be able to grease the bottom of the dishes with a little melted butter. Egg whites don't usually whisk well if there is grease in the mixture, but as the meringue has already been made we think that a thin layer of butter should help prevent sticking. Make sure it is a very thin layer as you don't want the meringue sitting in butter as it cooks. For the baking time it is difficult without knowing the size of the dishes, but we would guess at 10-15 minutes, or until the top of the meringue looks dried out, bearing in mind that it will cook a fraction more after the dishes are removed from the oven. Unfortunately, as we have not tried this ourselves, we are unable to guarantee the results. The truffle filling is not baked, so can just be poured or spooned onto the cold meringues.