3-Ingredient Meringuitos (Meringue Cookies)

These light and airy 3 ingredient merenguitos have that signature crispy exterior and melt in your mouth soft interior. Known affectionately as besitos or kisses in Latin cuisine, these meringue cookies are elegant, yet super simple to make. 

With the holiday season upon us, I can’t think of a more festive dessert to share than these Latin-style meringue cookies!

Merenguitos are delicate in appearance and texture. The bright white meringue gets piped into little cookies that are show stopping-ly beautiful and totally addicting.

The best part? They’re extremely easy to make, which is why their a staple holiday dessert in Puerto Rican and Cuban households.

This recipe comes together with just 3 ingredients (egg whites, sugar, and lemon juice) and produces up to 30 cookies.

While they do take a couple hours to bake (low and slow baby!), whipping them up with a stand or hand mixer takes only about 20 minutes. It’s a foolproof recipe that’s guaranteed to impress your friends and family.

Easy enough that your toddler can lend a helping hand, but beautiful enough that people will think your a pastry chef!

Kind of like these baked cream cheese quesitos, this is one of those recipes where the payoff far outweighs the effort. A delicious win-win!

3 Ingredient Grocery List

While these meringue cookies are incredibly easy to customize with food coloring and extract flavorings, the base is simple:

• egg whites – if you’re looking for something to do with the leftover egg yolks… try this homemade empanada dough
• white granulated sugar
• lemon juice or vanilla extract – feel free to use whichever flavoring you prefer, I find that the lemon cuts through the richness of the meringue beautifully

Find the full ingredient list with exact quantities in the recipe card below.

How to Make Merenguitos

Baking Tip: Bake at 200°F for 1 hour for chewy merenguitos or 2 hours for crunchy merenguitos.

The Sugar Trick

You may have noticed that this recipe uses a hot water bath method to incorporate the sugar instead of melting the sugar before incorporating.

This time saving technique was inspired by @el_aprendizz on Tiktok; definitely go check out his page for fantastic Latin American recipes.

This trick simplifies the recipe as there’s no need to melt sugar down on the stovetop or be extra careful with adding it slowly. The warm water bath helps the sugar to dissolve beautifully into the egg white mixture.

Adding Color & Flavor

As mentioned above, merenguitos are a great dessert to add your own spin to. This is easy to do using food coloring and extracts.

If you plan to add flavor or color, do so at the same time that you add the lemon juice.

Here are some ideas:

• Add a drop or two of festive colors like red or green for Christmas or pastels for Easter
• Divide the meringue in half in two bowls and add one color to one bowl and another to the other, then layer in your piping bag for a fun color combination
• Add a drop or two of amaretto, almond, peppermint, or coconut extract to give the cookies a unique flavor

Special Equipment & Tools

• Stand or hand mixer – I use my affordable hand mixer to whip the egg whites and meringue since it’s what I’ve got, and it works great! You could use a whisk but just know it will require lots of muscle and patience.
• Parchment paper – this is super important in making sure your meringue cookies don’t stick to the baking sheet while baking.
• Piping bag – you can skip this tool and use a gallon sized ziploc bag instead, just cut a hole in one of the bottom corners and pipe away. That said, then fun piping tips really add a fun design to the shape of these cookies.

Buen provecho,

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