With these mushrooms, the magic’s in the meringue Homemade Holidays
By: Eva Wasney Posted: 2:00 AM CST Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025

During the holidays, Carla Goldstein turns into a mushroom-making machine.

“I probably make four double recipes each season,” she says of the meringue mushrooms she’s been making for the last 45 years. “I walked into a friend’s house once and she had them in a crystal bowl and I said, ‘I have to learn how to make these.’”

When doubled, this recipe yields 100 mushroom-shaped meringues. While they closely resemble real mushrooms, these bite-sized desserts are sweet, airy and cute as a button.

They’re also fairly easy to assemble once you’ve mastered the technique — prior piping bag experience is an asset.

“It’s a really stiff meringue; you pipe the tops and you pipe the stems and then you bake them until they’re really dry,” Goldstein says, adding it takes roughly 40 minutes to prepare 100 caps and stems for baking.

“Then turn your oven off, leave them in the oven overnight and the next day it takes about an hour to assemble that many. Put something on your iPad or TV and sit and do it.”

Goldstein distributes her 400 or so meringues to family and friends, often packaging them in clean mushroom containers wrapped in cellophane to complete the theme.

Some tips: Don’t bother with fancy chocolate. Goldstein recommends using melted Merckens chocolate coating wafers to adhere the stems to the caps. If the stems are too pointy, shave off the tops slightly so they fit the caps more snugly.

Goldstein has kindly created a video demonstrating the baking and assembly process. You can view it below.

Meringue Mushrooms

3 egg whites

250 ml (1 cup) berry sugar

1.25 ml (1/4 tsp) salt

1.25 ml (1/4 tsp) cream of tartar

5 ml (1 tsp) vanilla extract

300 g melting chocolate

Cocoa powder, for dusting

Red food colour gel (optional)

Beat egg whites until frothy using a stand or electric mixer. Slowly add sugar, salt, cream of tartar and vanilla and beat until very stiff peaks form.

Add meringue mixture to a 16-inch piping bag with a 1/2-inch tip. For an optional candy-cane-stripe effect, paint two lines of red food colour gel on the inside of the piping bag before filling with meringue.

Line baking sheets with tin foil.

To make the mushroom stems, hold the piping bag vertically and squeeze while drawing away from the baking sheet to form squat cones. To make mushroom caps, pipe the meringue into rounds. Make an equal number of stems and caps and dust lightly with cocoa powder.

Preheat the oven to 225 F and bake caps and stems for 1 hour. Turn off the oven and leave baking sheets in the oven to cool.

Melt chocolate using a microwave or double boiler. Brush the bottom of the caps with chocolate and “glue” the top of the stem onto the underside of the cap. Let mushrooms cool upside down until chocolate has set.

— Carla Goldstein

Homemade Holidays is an annual Free Press tradition featuring 12 festive desserts published over 12 days in December. Click here to find this year’s batch of reader-submitted recipes. You can also visit wfp.to/recipecards to purchase a digital download of the cookie recipe cards to print your own recipe booklet at home.

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Eva Wasney
Reporter

Eva Wasney has been a reporter with the Free Press Arts & Life department since 2019. Read more about Eva.

Every piece of reporting Eva produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.