Lemon Meringue Pie

Christmas and new year are always filled with parties and celebrations, and that means food. This year is no exception!!! Besides the two big events, we had a few group of friends came around for dinner as well, therefore the whole 11 days between Christmas eve and the last day of public holiday was all about cooking and baking!

One night a couple of my high school friends came over for dinner for a catch up, plus it was my dear friend Sera's birthday... happy birthday gal!!!! So I thought I'd make a special dinner... Baked salmon fillet (I used the baked ocean trout recipe, which I found the salmon meat was much more tender!!! yummm), smoked salmon arancini (unfortunately I didn't take any photos... :( ), salad, and mussels by Lee... thanks Lee!

A dinner party wouldn't be complete without dessert! I started to flip through that new Asian dessert book I bought from Hong Kong - Everyday Treat 2 and I found the lemon meringue pie recipe! I have never made lemon meringue pie before, and I'm actually not a big fan of it because I've found it very sweet. But when I read this recipe, the amount of sugar in it is not actually that much! I guess that's the difference between western dessert and asian dessert recipes, so I gave this recipe a try!

Ingredients:

Pie Base:

195g unsalted butter

160g icing sugar

pinch of salt

37g egg

350g plain flour

Lemon Custard Filling

315g milk

36g custard powder

30g sugar

50g egg yolk

Zest and juice from 2 lemons

4 gelatine leaf

Meringue: 75g egg white, 40g sugar

Top Layer Meringue

50g egg white

30g sugar

Pie Base:

1) Sift the plain flour over the unsalted butter. Mix well.

2) Add icing sugar, salt and beaten eggs, then mix well with a rubber scraper and hand to make a dough.

3) Roll the dough in between 2 sheets of baking paper using a rolling pin till the dough becomes 3mm thick.

4) Line the pie mould with dough and cut off extra pie dough with a small knife.

5) Pierce hole using a fork and bake for 35min at 180C

Filling:

1) Beat egg yolk and 35g sugar with a hand whisk. Add in 1/3 of the milk and custard power. Whisk until smooth.

2) Heat the remaining milk then pour the it into the egg yolk mixture. Mix well.

3) Reheat the mixture again, and stir constantly until a thick paste form.

4) Add lemon juice and zest and fold well with a spatular

5) Prepare meringue - whisk the egg white with an electric mixer until foam. Then gradually add in sugar and whisk until soft peak form. Fold into the lemon mixture.

6) Prepare gelatine and add 1/4 of the lemon custard mixture into gelatine gently.

7) Pour the gelatin mixture into the leftover custard mixture and fold quickly until smooth.

8) Pour the mixture into the pie mould and refrigerate for 2 hours.

Meringue Top:

1) Whisk egg white with an electric mixer until soft peaks form. Gradually add in sugar and beat until glossy. Pipe on top of the pie and burn with a culinary torch.

Yes yes... this is a relatively long recipe, but it's actually not hard at all, you just have to prepare things in stages! Personally I don't like lemon meringue pie at all, but this was actually quite nice, not sweet at all and it has a very fresh lemony sour taste, I guess you can reduce the amount of lemon juice if you want to make it less sour. The crust of this pie was one of the best I've ever tasted, it's buttery but not over the top, it stayed crunchy even with the custard sitting in it overnight!! The only thing that let me down was the pipping of meringue on top, but I can't blame the recipe for it, it was just my lack of practise!!! Ooopppsss...

This recipe definitely gets my thumbs up for it!!!!!