Nigella's Cappuccino Pavlova

This delicious pavlova is so good – chewy, marshmallow-like centre, crispy shell, silky cream, bitter cocoa and lovely cappuccino flavour. All hail Nigella, Domestic Goddess; Potentate of Pavlova.

As I'm sure Nigella would agree, one does need an excuse to make this, but this week I found many, including:

• left-over egg whites from the home-made egg pasta at the weekend
• it's mid-March, and I'm still wear a polo-neck jumper everyday, as I have been for the past three months (excluding a recent trip to Italy)
• I'm addicted to sugar (and I'm #sorrynotsorry)
•  it's Tuesday

I followed Nigella's recipe for Cappuccino pavlova from her delicious Nigellisima series, but halved the ingredients and the cooking time (from 1hr, to 30mins). The two egg-whites I had produced a lovely sized pavlova, enough for 4 portions, with enough to spare for a dainty-sized portion left-over for me to eat when I'm home alone.

See, here's the math:

• 250 grams caster sugar / 125g caster sugar
• 4 teaspoons instant espresso powder (not instant coffee granules) / 2 tsp instant espresso powder although also works with 'Americano' instant coffee powder as I discovered)
• 4 large egg whites / 2 large egg whites
• 1 pinch of salt / 1 pinch of salt 
• 2 teaspoons cornflour / 1tsp cornflour
• 1 teaspoon white wine vinegar / 0.5 tsp white wine vinegar
• 300 millilitres double cream / 150ml double cream
• 1 teaspoon cocoa powder / 0.5 tsp cocoa powder

Once the pavlova was cooked and cool I put it on a plate and wrapped it in cling-film to be stored in the fridge. The main thing is to store the pavlova as air-tight as possible, and in a place as-dry-a-place as possible so that it doesn't go soggy – the cling-film and fridge combination works just fine.

I assemble the pavlova with the whole works (cream and cocoa additions) just before eating.

Nigella will tell you that you can actually freeze egg-whites – excellent for emergency pavlova-making, stash them in freezer bags and label how many egg-whites are in each.