Guests for dinner, no worries. Barbecue followed by my go-to favourite dessert – lemon meringue pie. It’s a bit fiddly to make, involving three stages: pastry crust, lemon curd filling and meringue top — but it’s never let me down. Marie offers to help but I say I have it all under control.
First, you make the sweet short-crust pastry base. This is the fiddliest bit because the pastry dough is so soft and inclined to fall apart when rolled out or when you place it into the pie dish. But today is a good day. It’s in the pie dish without a hitch. Until, as I admire my handiwork, I realize that I forgot to grease the dish beforehand! I’m not prepared to take it out and start again. So into the oven it goes to bake for 10 minutes or so until lightly browned. I’ll just have to hope I can get it out of the dish when serving.
As I take the pie crust from the oven and set it aside to cool, I realize that I have used plain flour and forgotten to add the baking powder. Now I have a flat crust that maybe won’t come out of the dish at all. That’s a first. But what can you do but push onwards? I’m not starting again.
Making the lemon curd is the second stage. I assemble all the ingredients – water, sugar, custard powder, evaporated milk and lemon juice – add them, except for the evaporated milk which goes in last, to a pan over heat and stir continuously, as required until the mixture thickens. Thicken it does and then turns into a lumpy gelatinous looking mass. That’s never happened before.
Desperate times call for desperate measures — it’s time to bring in the big gun, Marie says – use the hand-held stick blender. It works a treat, and the mixture is now the correct smooth and glossy texture. Now for the taste test. Something is still wrong. It tastes very custardy but not very lemony. That’s never happened before. Clearly, I need to add more lemon, but I’ve already used all our lemons. I’m so over it all by now.
Marie appears again in response to my wails, offers to go to the store to buy more lemons but then notices, there on the kitchen benchtop, the container of lemon juice I had squeezed to be added to the mixture! Didn’t taste very lemony, not lemony at all you twit. You forgot to add the lemon juice! You’ll be surprised to learn that adding the lemon juice at that late stage and reheating the mixture produced a very acceptable lemon curd.
Stage three, the meringue layer goes without any apparent hitch, the egg whites whip into lovely stiff peaks and I beat in the sugar nice and slowly, as required.
I bake the assembled pie until the meringue is browned just a little. The finished product looks good I have to say. Although the meringue has dropped a little. That’s never happened before. Perhaps my stiff peaks weren’t quite stiff enough? Still, I have a lemon meringue pie I can offer.
The feedback on the pie is all positive although I found the crust a little chewy. The best part of the evening though, was the laughter when I recounted the pie’s creation story.
Burnside Writers Group 