Let's Eat #4 Lemon Meringue Pie
Firstly, I need to say that this picture does not do this bake justice!! :)
It was Pa's birthday this weekend and his favorite cake is lemon meringue pie. Is that officially a cake? That's a discussion for another day but anyway, we decided to make it!! As any regular readers will know, we had a trial run with a similar cake a couple of weeks ago but this week we were a little bit braver! We made our own pastry!
We followed the Tesco recipe for gluten free lemon meringue pie but used ready made lemon curd... we were on a tight timescale!! I've never been all that successful with homemade pastry, even non-gluten-free pastry but these pies turned out really well!
They were really fun and pretty quick to make (using the ready made curd did help there). The children loved rolling out the pastry and we made a few little pies so that they could both put their own pastry in their own tins!
For those more seasoned bakers among you, this will probably be blindingly obvious but it was something that I hadn't ever tried before - the recipe suggested that you roll the pastry out between two layers of cling film and it was a great trick. Made the pastry (which isn't easy to handle at the best of times) a lot easy to move around and meant that the children could pretty much make the pies themselves. It also meant that we could get the pastry really thin without it breaking.
We had great fun whisking the meringue and of course making sure that the bowl was completely clean at the end!
Anyway, we blind baked the pastry (which the children thought was hilarious - why are we making a rice cake like that?!??!! ), popped the curd and meringue on top, baked that until crisp et voila, they were a great success! The meringue was lovely and crunchy and we used the left over yolks for homemade custard! What more could you ask for?!
I stored the pies in a tin and they were absolutely fine the next day.
Happy Birthday Pa!!
