Pavlova
A meringue dried for two hours in a cool oven so the shell stays crisp and the centre collapses to marshmallow under the cream.
- Prep
- 25 min
- Cook
- 2 hr
- Resting
- 4 hr
- Total
- 6 hr 25 min
- Serves
- 8
- Revisions
- 5
Allergens
- Eggs
- Milk
- Sulphites
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Method
Heat the oven to 110C/225F.
Draw a 22cm circle on a sheet of baking paper and lay it pencil-side down on a baking tray.
Check that the bowl and whisk are spotlessly clean and dry. Any grease, or a trace of yolk in the whites, and they will not take air at all.
Whisk the egg whites with the fine salt on medium speed for 2-3 minutes, until they hold soft peaks that flop over at the tip.
Add the caster sugar a tablespoon at a time with the whisk still running, leaving about ten seconds between additions.
Take four or five minutes over the sugar. Tipped in all at once it collapses the foam, and added faster than it can dissolve it leaves the meringue gritty and weeping beads of syrup in the oven.
Whisk for a further 3-4 minutes after the last of the sugar, until the meringue is thick, white and glossy and stands in a peak that holds its point.
Rub a little between finger and thumb. It should feel completely smooth; any grit means undissolved sugar and another minute of whisking.
Sprinkle the cornflour over the surface and add the vinegar and vanilla.
Fold them through with a spatula in a few strokes, no more.
Pile the meringue inside the drawn circle.
Work it out to the line with a palette knife, building the sides higher than the middle so there is a shallow crater for the cream.
Bake for 2 hours, until the outside is dry and crisp to a light tap and the pavlova lifts cleanly off the paper at the edge.
Turn the oven off and leave the pavlova inside with the door shut for at least 4 hours, or overnight. A meringue taken from a hot oven into a cold kitchen contracts too fast and cracks right across the top.
Whip the cold cream with the icing sugar to soft peaks that flop when the whisk is lifted.
Spoon the cream into the crater, leaving a rim of bare meringue showing.
Scatter the raspberries and strawberries over the cream.
Spoon the pulp and seeds of the passion fruit across the top.
Assemble it within half an hour of eating. Cream and fruit juice dissolve meringue from the inside, and a pavlova topped in the morning is a soggy disc by dinner.
Cut straight down through the shell with a large knife and expect it to shatter, which is the point.
Nobody has rated this recipe yet.
Sign in to rate this recipe. One rating per person, and you can change it.
What to expect
- Taste
Very sweet, and it depends entirely on being served with something that is not. Unwhipped-tasting double cream and sharp fruit are structural rather than decorative — passionfruit especially, whose acidity cuts the sugar in a way berries alone do not. The meringue itself tastes of little but sugar and a faint vanilla; everything interesting is the contrast around it.
- Aroma
Almost nothing. A dried meringue is close to odourless, which is part of why the fruit matters.
- Texture
THE WHOLE DISH. A shell that shatters under the spoon, and immediately under it a soft, chewy, marshmallow centre that pulls slightly. Then cold cream, then fruit. Four textures in one spoonful, and the reason the recipe exists in this form rather than as a plain meringue.
- Sound
The shell breaking under the first spoon, which is the most satisfying moment in serving it.
- How the flavour moves
Sweetness first and hard, then cream flattening it, then the fruit's acid arriving last and clearing the mouth. Eaten without the fruit it is one flat note and too much of it.
- Serve it
Cool, never cold. Refrigerating a finished pavlova softens the shell; it is assembled at the last moment for that reason.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Easy to make and easy to ruin, and the ruin happens in the first four minutes.
- Cost
Very low. Six egg whites, sugar, cream and fruit.
- Equipment
A stand mixer or hand whisk, baking paper, a tray
- Where it goes wrong
Adding the sugar too fast. Any trace of yolk or grease. Opening the oven during drying. Treating the cracks as a mistake and starting again.
- Making it ahead
The shell keeps two days in an airtight container and is genuinely better made the day before. Assemble within the hour of serving.
- Scaling it
Two smaller pavlovas dry more reliably than one large one.
- Substitutions
Caster sugar only — granulated will not dissolve in the time available and leaves the meringue gritty and weeping.
- Dietary swaps
Aquafaba works and gives a softer shell; the marshmallow centre is less pronounced.
Where it comes from
- Origin
DISPUTED between Australia and New Zealand — see core.history, which records both claims and the evidence for each. The dessert is named for Anna Pavlova either way.
- Said out loud
pav-LOH-va for the dessert, stress on the second syllable. THE RUSSIAN SURNAME IS STRESSED DIFFERENTLY — PAV-lo-va, on the first — and that matters here because the dish is named after a Russian ballerina and Lana Petrovna is the presenter. Her accent instruction is marked ALWAYS and reaches the audio line of every prompt, so there is a real pull toward the Russian stress on a word that is literally a Russian surname. Every phoneme survives either way and a viewer looking at a meringue understands it regardless, so this is a listen-on-playback item rather than a blocker — and unlike a mis-said 'Pho Bo', there is no respelling that steers stress without looking wrong on the page. The remedy if it lands badly is a regeneration, not a rewrite.
- History
DISPUTED, and it is one of the better-documented food disputes there is. Both Australia and New Zealand claim it, both named for the ballerina Anna Pavlova, who toured the region in 1926 and 1929. New Zealand's claim rests on a 1929 recipe in a Rangiora women's magazine and on later research by Helen Leach, who catalogued 667 pavlova recipes from 300 sources and found New Zealand examples predating Australian ones; the Oxford English Dictionary revised its entry in 2010 in New Zealand's favour. Australia's claim centres on a 1935 creation by Herbert Sachse at Perth's Esplanade Hotel. Neither side concedes, and meringue desserts of the general shape existed in Europe well before either. Say none of it out loud.
Apple and Almond Tart
Apple and Blackberry Crumble
Baked Rice Pudding
Baked Vanilla Cheesecake
Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
Classic Scones