I was tuckered out so I went home at this point and went to bed. Just after I fell asleep, my sister sent me a text message asking if the pavlova needed to come out of the oven. I had a rough night of sleep and woke up at about 2 am and saw her message. My sister is a weirdo who doesn’t snooze notifications on her phone and also has the sound on so I didn’t want to send her a text message at two in the morning to tell her not to take it out of the oven unless she has an airtight container to put it in and the oven has cooled completely. Before we go further in this story, I have to interrupt it with a public service announcement that every modern phone allows you to set notification boundaries, so it doesn't matter what spam text you get at night, it won't wake you. If this is something you think my be useful, do an internet search for notification downtime for your type of phone and set it up. Most phones will allow you to say what times are inappropriate for people to contact you, and log which phone contacts should be able to call you anyway in case of an emergency. Back to Christmas morning, 2am. I scheduled a text message to go to her at 9 am to say not to get it out of the oven unless you had that airtight container. I figured that 9 am was a nice enough sleep in and wouldn’t wake her up too early if she’d managed to be able to stay in bed that late. By about 5 am, I was back asleep. I woke up at 10 am to hilarious chaos. You see at about 7:30 am my sister had gotten out of bed and helpfully gone into the kitchen and turned all the ovens on to start preheating them ready to cook. She had forgotten that the pavlova was in there. As she and her family were unwrapping presents under the Christmas tree they couldn’t figure out why the whole house had started to smell and look a little faintly like there was smoke everywhere. They thought the oven might be malfunctioning and went to investigate to discover the pavlova in all of its licorice black charcoal glory. It was quickly whisked out of the house and dumped off the veranda to smoke outside.
My sister was devastated. She was aghast. She tried to ring me and then sent me multiple messages with a photo of the burnt pavlova tossed off the veranda. She was so worried that I would wake up and see it and cry. Then at 9 am my scheduled text message goes to her telling her not to take it out of the oven unless she has an airtight container. She frantically responds to me to see above text messages and then rings my mum crying about the whole thing falling apart. I think she was very worried that she had ruined my Christmas. So when I woke up and saw all of this chaos, I was wheezing with laughter. I rang my sister and told her that it was okay. She was really worried that we wouldn’t get a pavlova but I asked if we had enough eggs and it turned out that we actually did have another dozen eggs because a friend of the family has chickens. So I set up a little station in the laundry on Christmas Day and made a whole extra two pavs. As soon as all of the lunch food was taken out of the ovens we were able to let the chosen pavlova oven cool to the right temperature and put the new ones in to cook. I set the alarms on my phone and ran back-and-forth to adjust the temperatures at the right time. It cooked and cooled down in time for us to have it at dinner time. Our family usually do a rather large lunch and then save desert for dinner. The swans were just stuck on the side with the cream that was covering the whole pavlova. My meringue wasn’t crisp (a few swans dropped their elegant heads falling asleep on the job) and I now know all the reasons why so I’m looking forward to next time when I can implement some of the stuff I’ve learned. A couple of days later I made another impromptu pavlova for the other side of the family bringing it to 5 pavs in total for the week. I think next year I have to take on custard making duties given the number of egg yolks we end up with leftover.
Last Christmas, my sister had asked me to make a swan pavlova . This was inspired by a couple of pictures that had popped up in her feed on Pinterest throughout the year. This is impressive in itself because as most people know Pinterest has become mostly unusable due to excessive AI images. Pinterest included the ability to turn off AI a few months ago which has made it a much better experience. Anyway, my sister had seen a picture verified that it was real and showed it to me and we both thought it was beautiful. I used to be the member of the family that cooked the roast but my brother-in-law took that over from me (he does a spectacular job) so my new job is making the annual Christmas pavlova. This swans looked fun so I thought I’d give it a go. It turns out there’s not that much difference between making meringue and making pavlova so two days before Christmas. I used my sister’s piping tools to make seven swans. This was inspired by the Christmas carol 12 days of Christmas which features seven swans in the song. The recipe I used ended up having so much meringue that there was plenty of extra so I piped some extra bows and things as well. The picture she has shown me had only a couple of swans and they were quite large but I thought seven worked really well.
Because it was my first time making meringue I wasn’t too stressed about it being perfect. It was about having a fun experience having a go and seeing what would come out of the attempt. I actually ended up learning quite a bit about meringue and about pavlova that is going to make next Christmas a very different experience. But back into our current timeline which puts us the day before Christmas Eve, having just made these swans. Just like with pavlova, they were left to cool overnight in the oven and the next day– Christmas Eve– I made the pavlovas. Most pavlova recipes require four eggs but given the amount of people I was making it for I made it triple the size and used 12. I made two pavlova‘s in total at this point, one was a small one that we could put lactose free cream on and the other one was the big one for everyone that isn’t lactose free. This Maggie Beer recipe is common reference point for me. Context for my non-Australian friends: Maggie Beer is an Australian cooking icon alongside Stephanie Alexander, who are equivalent to a Julia Child or Martha Stewart over here. We repeated the same process of putting the pavlovas in the oven overnight to cool.
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