That Dang Meringue

This is a picture of the lovely meringue cookies that I made. But not without some difficulty. You want the whole story? Okay. So at work, we have a prestigious party in the middle of November which includes many trays of petit fours (which translates to "small cakes"). Although, we're not doing actually cakes. Mostly just cookies and chocolates and whatnot. Anyhoo, these meringue cookies are for that party. So I planned on using the Italian Buttercream recipe we use, but it makes quite a lot, even if you're not adding the butter. I then decided to just quarter the recipe because I had done it before. Not hard, right? Ha! Well, I gathered all my ingredients and off I went. I whipped the egg whites and cooked the sugar to 245F. Next step, pouring the sugar into the egg whites while the mixer is running. A little precarious, but done with little difficulty. It looked okay, but sort of like there was more than usual in the bowl. Eh, oh well, I thought. I then started piping the meringue with a pastry bag, to create the cute little cookies in the piture (at that point it looked a little airy to me, but whatever). Well, when I tried to pipe them, it looked...wrong. Very wrong. And for the life of me, I could not figure out why. I tried whipping it longer, but that didn't help. So I figured I would just add 1/4 of the butter in the recipe and make some buttercream. As I added the butter, it started to liquify. Um, what? Exactly. So, at that point, it was clearly trash. Soupy meringue. Yum. Not. As I was throwing the ickiness away, I started going through the ingredients in my head. Sugar, water, sugar, egg whites...wait. Egg whites. How many did I do? Um, so apparently, I add 1/2 of the about from the recipe instead of 1/4. HUGE difference. Well, at least I know I made the stuff correctly, I just had my brain on pause when it came to amounts. So, to make a long story short (which isn't possible at this point,but...) I screwed up the first time, but got it right the second. The picture is proof of the second batch. The cookies in the the background were sprinkled with cinnamon, the front ones left plain. Looks pretty good, eh? Well, I just thought I would share one of my failures, for some reason. The end, I suppose.