The Ever Swelling Pavlova!

My dear friend, Eileen, just celebrated a birthday. She was sooo excited to go to Matilda's restaurant because they serve Australian food. Eileen was especially looking forward to Pavlova. It's an Australain dessert named after the Russian prima ballerina, Anna Matveyevna Pavlova.

The next Monday Eileen told me she was so dissapointed because they tried to find the restaurant and apparently it has been out of business for a while. They ended up at Ruby River, which was good, but not what she was expecting.

So I decided to look up this dessert she said she liked so much and see how hard it was to make. It's basically a meringue crust with whipped cream and fruit. Here is a picture of what my recipe said it was supposed to look like.

It didn't look that hard to make so I decided to do a dry run on my family for Sunday dinner. It looks kind of like a fruit pizza so I smeared the meringue to about two inches from the edge of my pan. The recipe stated that it would swell while cooking. To me that meant that it would rise. Little did I know that it would not rise too much but it would almost double it's size in diameter! I hadn't planned on blogging this so I don't have a before picture to show you, but here are a few pics of the cooking pavlova in the oven.

You can't even see the pizza pan in the first picture! Luckily when it was taken out of the oven, all of the overhang came with it.

I couldn't believe how big it had gotten. I used a whole container of whipped cream and added blueberries, strawberries, bananas, and kiwi to the top.

I thought it turned out pretty cool, but had no idea how it was going to taste. My dad was the first one to take a bite. Now he isn't the type to eat lots of cool whip or fruit so I was a little scared of his reaction. This pic is right before his first bite....you can see the fear in his eyes!

He ended up really liking it. I think he even had another piece. Here is Stevie trying it out.

It wasn't ten minutes later and the pan looked like this:

It was a success! I decided next time to not spread the meringue out so much. When I made it for Eileen this is how it looked before the oven.

Here is how that one turned out:

And here is how I decorated it:

This time I put kiwi, bananas, and peaches. I surprised Eileen this morning with it and she was astounded. Here are some of her candid shots, scooping up the remains...Happy Birthday Eileen!