Daring Bakers: Lemon Meringue Pie

Oh, the decadence. This month’s daring bakers challenge was to make lemon meringue pie. Well, folks, what a pie this is! There were a few mistakes along the way, of course: I misread the amount of sugar to go into the crust, for example, so ended up with 1/2 a cup of sugar instead of 1/4 of a cup. This was taken to be a good thing by the tasters, though, who said, “it tastes like sugar cookies!” Serendipity? Perhaps. The other problem I ran into was the fact that I don’t know where our pie-plates are packed: we packed them with the glass things, and have left quite a few “glass / fragile” boxes packed, simply because we didn’t feel like bringing them out when we’ll likely move to a different flat towards the end of the school year. So, I was stuck with trying to make this work in a springform pan. Never, folks. Never.

Getting pie crust to work in a springform pan means that you’ve got to kind of drape it over the sides. Doing this with an 8″ diameter pan means that you’ve got a 3″ wide strip of dough which is 25″ long! Physically impossible to get right, let me tell you. So, I decided I’d cut the side dough into segments & try to patch them together when I’d managed to get them draped over. Well, it worked, mostly … but wasn’t anywhere near a perfect job, and left me not at all proud at the shape of things.

We’ve been warned repeatedly about the differences between UK flour and Canadian / American flours, so we were expecting to have more trouble with the texture or composition of the dough for the crust. This was not the case, except in that the amount of water called for by the recipe was by no means necessary, so I’m guessing that some of the problems people run into in making the transition to the UK is simply that UK flour may have a higher moisture content, which would tend to throw things off, for sure.

How did it turn out? Well, we had some friends over, and timed it such that I pulled the pie from the oven just before their arrival. After a lovely dinner, we were in the right mood to try pie. You see, unbeknown to us, our friends do not like eggs, either. So, here we were, with four people who don’t particularly care for eggs, eating meringue pie! We figured that it’d be a good bet that some locals would like this – it is a British pie, after all. Once again, though, we’re reminded that Scots are not British: the crust was great, the filling wonderful, and the meringue was left in clumps on the plates.

After our friends left for the evening, I packed up two slices for our next-door neighbors. Since I’d just heard them come home, I proceeded to offer them their slices … to be told, “I have to be honest with you, I really don’t like lemon-meringue pie. My partner might, though.” Sigh.

Two slices sit in the fridge, awaiting someone to eat them. Is it a good recipe? Certainly! Would we make it again? Not unless an army of egg-lovers were to come by, needing dessert!

Be sure to check out the other daring bakers and their pies – there are over 100 of us doing this now, so that’s quite a few experiences with this same recipe, in case you needed to know that it’s been thoroughly tested! This month’s host is Jen, from Canadian Baker. At some point she’ll post the recipe up for all to see.

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