Hubris.   Such a lovely word, don’t you think. 

It’s been what seems like ages, way back just after Christmas that Jan, the Canadian Baker, our hostess this month, issued the Lemon Meringue Pie for the January Daring Bakers Challenge.   Oh, yes I am so guilty of thinking, even saying out loud for all the world to hear, Lemon Meringue Pie . . . piece of cake.  I’ve done that!  This will be fine.   After that I really gave very little thought to it.  Then one day there it was or maybe it was Karen (BakeMyDay) saying come on we can’t be skipping out on this one. 

And so it was on Friday the 25th I got up thinking I’d head to the pool for a swim but there was the email from Karen saying she was ready when I was.   So, I trundled down to the kitchen with MamaMac (that’s my computer) under my arm and signed onto gmail.  

You’ll be able to find the recipe on Jan’s site here. 

First step is the crust.  For some reason I really love using my old fashioned pastry cutter but this recipe called for doing the crust in the food processor and follow the recipe I did.  A Daring Baker follows the recipe.

Now I do always give my pastry blender a jump start by grating frozen butter and then returning the grated butter to the freezer for some 10 minutes or so.  This recipe wanted everything cold for the crust so I put the flour and sugar in the food processor bowl in the freezer with the butter.

Pools of butter in the bottom of every crust, not going to be a good pie crust.  Not only that, the crust no longer even came close to covering the sides of my pie plates!  I had to dig the beans out of some of the crust.  The sides having fallen down and into the bottom, I pushed back up with the back of a spoon as best I could.

None of my crusts kept any sign of a nicely crimped edge but the butter pools disappeared and they did take on a fairly nice golden color after 35 minutes in the oven.

I made four mini-pies.  The recipe called for putting the meringue on a cooled filling.  Lots of the Daring Bakers and many of my sources said to put the meringue on a hot filling to somewhat cook and seal the meringue so the filling didn’t get runny.

I mixed the meringue up so that it was ready to put on top of hot filling on two of the mini-pies and then let the filling cool on two of the pies before the meringue as the recipe directed.

The scuttle-butt on the DB blog was to only bring the cornstarch and water for the filling to a boil.  The first bubble, take it off the heat.  (Actually, it may mostly have been Tartelette but Cook’s Illustrated said the same.) 

I throughly tempered the corn starch and egg yolks (I think this is what Karen called “they set up house”).  I returned it to the heat, again just to the first bubble.

The individual parts of this recipe are each OK.  The crust was crisp and a little cookie like.  The filling was good and only got tangy after several bites.  The meringue was smooth and sweet buy didn’t overwhelm with sweet.

There was no difference between the pies with hot filling topped with meringue and the cooled filling topped with meringue.  None of the pies was runny.  None of the meringue was weepy.

Put them all together, let them “play house together” as Karen would say and WOW!! 

The cookie crust is crisp against the heavenly smooth of the lemony filling.  The sweet meringue brings out all the beauty of the lemon and gently smooth out any tangy bite.  The sum of this pie greatly exceeded the parts.     

I had four mini-pies with filling and meringue left over.  The four mini-pies were enjoyed by eight testers!  This is really good pie.          

This was a recipe rich with learning and even made great pie!  Thank you Jan for the recipe!!   Thank you Ivonne & Lisa, the Daring Baker Founders, for this incredible edible group!!      And thank you once again for being my baking bud Karen!                                 

I think when you follow the links to the other daring bakers our experience with pie have great variety.