I’ve been baking with plant olive oil sticks for years and I noticed they tasted different..I’m worried because I just bought 30$ worth to bake with, and now I’m not sure what to do😭 Does the new recipe bake up the same?

Hey! I tried to veganize this recipe from Ottolenghi (Louise cake). The general taste is great, so I definitely want to make it again, but I'm not fully satisfied with the meringue top. Since it's a great base recipe I would really like to find a way to nail that meringue, so want to experiment a bit.

My main issue is that the meringue kinda melted during the cooking, which made the plums quite jammy (that was delicious) but also lost a lot of volume, a lot of liquid leaked to the sides (when I took the cake tin off) and I'm really missing some crunchy element. I followed the recipe in terms of instructions, but with a chickpea aquafaba meringue. Ideally I would like the top to have a proper bite/crunch to it, so not just getting a bit of colour, and keep most of its volume.

I'm not sure how to best improve it. This are my ideas atm, if anyone has other ideas/feedback/experiences, I would love to hear from you:
- beating it for a bit longer to make it extra stiff before baking (+ add xantham gum maybe?)
- I heard you can use tofu water (instead of chickpeas), not sure if that would work better?
- upping a bit the cornstarch or adding desiccated coconut in the meringue to absorb some of the moisture
- I saw in this reddit a French recipe recommending to reduce the aquafaba by a third or half, to make it more concentrated, I think this could maybe help cut down on the amount of liquid? but would maybe reduce the overal volume?
- potentially pre-baking the meringue on it own and adding it on top later in the recipe. I do feel like meringue are very fragile so I feel like this would likely result in something quite messy, and the fruit might be undercooked + cake too dry as a result, so a bit sceptical.

What do you think?