My mother-in-law, Barbara, often visits
her friends, Peter and Carol, in Cornwall on a Sunday evening. We decided to
join her for yesterday’s trip. A gathering of 5 people would surely be a good
opportunity to share some baking, and based on some inside information I
decided that the baking that I would be sharing would be a lemon meringue pie.
Matt, my husband, was out
watching a sci-fi film with his friends on Saturday night; I saw this as the ideal
opportunity to tackle the lemon meringue pie. It is a much more complex undertaking
than my usual baking because it requires significantly more utensils than my
standard efforts and would probably create a lot of mess.
Having shown an uncommon level of
planning I had sourced some lemons earlier on in the day. This resulted in my
least favourite, but most conveniently located, supermarket becoming even less
favoured as a surly youth informed me that “we’re all out of lemons”. So I
detoured to a more favoured “local” supermarket where the lemon supply was in
no way compromised: one lemon for 35p or 5 for £1.50. I didn’t know how many
lemons I needed (I hadn’t done that much planning) but some rudimentary
mathematics indicated that the multipack was the most economical option and I
was sure that I could find some other uses for lemons if I had any left over.
My granny used to make fantastic
pastry, as yet, I’m not as good. This is despite having very cold hands most of
the time which is apparently a good thing for making pastry. I suppose that’s
kind of irrelevant when you cheat and use a food processor to make the pastry.
It seemed to come out of the machine ok, the difficult bit was rolling it out
to the required thickness of 3mm. I was not about to start measuring this so I
just sort of rolled it quite thin. The main problem was that chunks kept
getting stuck to the rolling pin (despite liberal flouring – cue mess creation 1)
so it got a bit uneven with a few holes. So I had to do a bit of a patching up
job. The first nerve-wracking part of the process was the transfer of the base
to the tin, but with a swift movement I managed it without pastry
disintegration.
If I was in a hurry I would have
been tempted to skip the next stage: chilling the pastry base for 30 minutes.
But I wasn’t in a hurry (if I was I probably shouldn’t have embarked upon a
lemon meringue pie) and this half hour would be perfect for a quick bit of
dinner.
I don’t own any baking beans. I
always see them in baking shops, pick them up and then see the price and decide
that I can do without them. So I lined my pastry case with raw lentils for
blind baking. It’s a funny phrase “blind” baking as I can see through my oven
window very well while it’s in there.
While the pastry was baking I set
to on the lemon filling. The recipe required 6 lemons. Unfortunately “5” that I
had seen on the label of my lemon multipack was actually telling me that lemon
counted as a one of my 5 day, not that there were 5 lemons in the pack. So I
had only 4 new lemons. Fortunately I found an older lemon in the fridge, plus
two very aged limes, altogether I figured that this would be enough citrus. So
I zested the fruit (cue mess creation 2 –I tried really hard to get it all into
the bowl but the lemon “spray” seems to go all over the place), except for the
very aged limes. I used one of my favourite kitchen power tools, the electric
citrus juicer, to get as much juice as possible from the fruit, including this
time the aged limes which although looked the worse for wear on the outside
were quite acceptable on the inside. You add some corn flour to the juice and
zest. I find the behaviour of corn flour most peculiar and so mixing it to the required
“smooth paste” baffled me. I just kind of gave it a swoosh before adding to
some boiling water on the hob and hoped that the mixture would do whatever it
was supposed to do.
The next nerve wracking part of
the process was egg separation. The filling called for 6 egg yolks. I only had
6 eggs so would need 100% success with the egg separation. Maybe I’m not as bad
at egg separation as I give myself credit for as I achieved 6 separated eggs. I
think it was because I didn’t have an audience, I’m sure if Matt had been there
it would have gone wrong and we’d have had to make an emergency trip to the
corner shop for more eggs. Anyway, I whisked up my 6 egg yolks with some sugar
and then added this to the mixture on the hob. The recipe says to allow the mixture
to cool slightly before you add the eggs and sugar (I presume because otherwise
you’d scramble the eggs) but I’m never sure what instructions like “slightly”
mean so I took the pan off the hob for 5 minutes or so and hoped for the best.
It didn’t scramble so obviously 5 minutes cooling was slightly enough. Then back
on to the hob to heat until “thickened”; I didn’t really know what that meant
as it already seemed quite thick. So I just let it simmer for 5 minutes or so
and again hoped for the best.
If I had been clever and / or
confident I would have done some multi-tasking here and made the meringue topping
whilst the filling was “thickening”. But I was neither clever nor confident. So
didn’t start on the meringue until the lemon filling was safely poured into the
pastry case. I was careful to follow the recipe closely for the meringue as I’m
particularly inexperienced in making this and I’ve got it in my head that it’s
one of those things that can very easily go wrong. And after quite a bit of
high speed whisking (cue mess creation 3) it seemed to have met the criteria of
“stiff” and “glossy”. So I spooned it over the filling and even went so far as
to create a swirly pattern on top.
The next nerve wracking moment
would be getting the completed pie out of the oven: this was a lot of effort I
had been to and I didn’t want to crash at the last. I was worried about leakage of lemon so had balanced it precariously on a baking tray (trying to avoid making the bottom of my oven any more mucky than it already is). Fortunately it came out smoothly and as a bonus there had been no leakage of lemon during the cooking
process. I was not going to risk it further by trying to remove the pie from the
tin. That would have to wait until Sunday.
Having completed the pie I was
left with a small amount of pastry, quite a lot of lemon filling and 2 egg
whites. Not wanting this to go to waste I proceeded with a little improvisation
to use it all up. Having followed the recipe closely for the first batch of
meringue I decided to experiment for another lot and see what happened if I
threw in all the ingredients at once. Neither was I about to dirty another bowl
so used the one that I had already used for the meringue. The result of these
actions was a mixture that was neither glossy nor stiff. But still I was not
going to let it go to waste. So I assembled everything together in a rather
haphazard manner in a fairy cake tin. Four of the positions I lined with the
remaining pastry, the other 8 would have to be caseless. Then I distributed the
egg white and sugar mixture (it would be an untruth to call it meringue) and finished
all 12 off with a dollop of the lemon mixture (cue huge mess creation). What
resulted after about 20 minutes in the oven can probably best be described as lemon meringue blobs.
I packaged up the pie securely for
transport down to Peter and Carol’s yesterday. We first enjoyed a game of Smite
(kind of a cross between bowls and darts and unsurprisingly I wasn’t very good)
in the lovely Cornish sunshine. And then a roast dinner before the lemon meringue
pie was unveiled from its aluminium foil. Amazingly it held together when taken
out of the tin. Even more amazingly it held together when sliced. And the
verdict? “That’s a treat”, Peter declared.
We left them with some for today
and brought some back for ourselves. I managed to dissuade Matt from having it
for breakfast but we both are very much looking forward to lunch. But first I must tidy up the kitchen
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