22 Heavenly Meringue Desserts

Pastry chef Nicole Krasinski's buttery, flaky cookies are perfect for sandwiching a juicy compote of plump blueberries, topped with a light, silk meringue. Krasinski developed this simple dessert for her mother, who adores these flavors. When she put it on the menu at San Francisco's Rubicon, customers swooned over the combination as well; it's the best-selling dessert during the summer.

This beloved and much-Instagrammed dessert--meringues flavored with charred cornhusk powder and filled with a luscious, sweet corn cream--is from chef Enrique Olvera's brand-new cookbook, Mexico from the Inside Out.

The kiwis and mango that fill these airy, low-fat meringues are high in vitamin C and other antioxidants. The low-calorie passion fruit seeds add tartness and intense tropical flavor.

Simple, fun icebox cake is made by layering wafers with whipped cream and refrigerating them until the wafers soften into a cakelike texture. Kim Schwenke creates a dazzling version by alternating a creamy mix of mascarpone and Marsala with layers of homemade chocolate-graham wafers. The finishing touch is fluffy espresso meringue.

Chef Helene Henderson is obsessed with cranberries, which remind her of her native Sweden. Here, she serves them with a light, sweet, soft meringue rolled around fluffy whipped cream.

Pastry chef Waylynn Lucas of Fonuts in Los Angeles uses xanthan gum to keep the meringue in her baked Alaska stable after she mixes it with pineapple puree.

These are among the simplest macarons, made with only sugar, almond flour, egg whites and red food coloring—and a filling of raspberry jam.

Yigit Pura perfected this crisp-creamy French dessert while working at restaurant Daniel in New York City. His updated version combines little lime meringue kisses with basil ice cream and sweet mango sorbet.

Meringata—Italian for "meringue cake"—is an elegant yet homey frozen dessert of whipped cream sandwiched between meringue rounds. Rolando Beramendi slices the meringata and serves it with a warm chocolate-espresso sauce.

This extraordinary dessert, made with crisp chocolate-hazelnut meringue and whipped cream, is simple to make. But pastry chef Daniel Jasso of Portland, Oregon’s Genoa restaurant has nicknamed it "the beast," because slicing it can be tricky—the meringue tends to crumble. The solution: Freeze the cake, cut it with a serrated knife and let it return to room temperature before serving.

This recipe combines antioxidant-packed summer berries with an easy-to-make, protein-rich meringue. A touch of cumin gives the meringues an exotic earthiness, but they're equally delicious without the spice.

Delicate and substantial at the same time, Nick Malgieri's pistachio-topped coconut meringues are chewy on the inside and crisp on the outside. For the best results, bake them on a dry day: Humidity can make meringues disappointingly soft.

In her version of lemon meringue pie, Gale Gand forgoes a traditional crust for quick-baked sheets of sugared phyllo dough, which she layers with house-made lemon curd and a brown-sugar meringue. The recipe, a classic at Tru restaurant in Chicago, appears in Gand's book Butter Sugar Flour Eggs (Clarkson Potter). At home, use good quality store-bought phyllo dough and lemon curd.

Instead of making a butter cake, F&W’s Grace Parisi created this recipe with nonfat angel food cake. Inspired by lime- and mint-scented candles, she tops the cake with lime sorbet mixed with chopped mint and rum.

Karen Hatfield of Hatfield's in Los Angeles usually prepares mini versions of this recipe for her petit four plate, topping the rich, chocolaty cupcakes with a fluffy swirl of espresso meringue and some cocoa-nib dust. At home, instead of making bite-size cupcake snacks, bake full-size cupcakes in standard muffin pans. Sprinkle the frosted cupcakes with a bit of cocoa powder mixed with instant espresso.

Baking peaches brings out their sweetness and also makes them meltingly soft. If you can find perfectly ripe and drippy summer peaches, however, you don't need to bake them. Simply blanch them whole in boiling water for about 10 seconds to loosen the skins, then peel and slice them.

Most pastry chefs love lemon and orange. Deborah Snyder of Manhattan's Lever House, however, champions the also-ran of the citrus world: grapefruit. In one cold, creamy dessert, she layers pink grapefruit curd in a crunchy graham-cracker crust with caramel sauce and a delicate topping of fluffy meringue.

“Don’t judge the taste of these cookies by the crags and cracks,” says sous-chef Merrin Mae Gray of L.A.’s Rossoblu. (Their Italian name is brutti ma buoni, “ugly but good.”) The pecans and potent grappa are unexpectedly elegant, and the crisp outsides and chewy centers make these meringues seriously addictive.

In 2018, Food & Wine named this recipe one of our 40 best.

A homemade version of creamy sweetened condensed milk gives the tart lemon custard in this pie an especially luscious texture and flavor. The billowy Italian meringue topping browns beautifully under the broiler if you don't have a torch on hand.

Dean Fearing and Jill Bates, the pastry chef at Fearing's, collaborated on this spiced pumpkin pudding covered with meringue swirls. "It's what all Southerners love about their pies, whether they're coconut, chocolate or banana—the meringue," Fearing says.

This sweet-potato pie looks like a pumpkin pie, but the filling is actually made with sweet potato.