Sunny Days

Goodness... let me tell you, making Lemon Meringue Pie is NOT a piece of cake!! I thought it was bordering on disastrous especially cause out of all the millions of recipes I looked up, it just says 9 inch pie crust or whatever and not HOW to make pie crust so I was a little apprehensive about that cause well I've never done this before... Anyway so I found this one recipe that's easy enough but it involves 'shortening' and as far as I know you don't get that in India so I used butter instead and it seemed pretty okay and then it comes to the rolling bit and its all pretty much falling apart. So somehow I rolled it out big enough to fit my baking dish which is all ready and waiting and then guess what?? It doesn't FIT in the blooming oven!! So I had to re-do the whole thing using a different dish.

Anyway, it didn't taste bad but here's a few tips if you live in India and you want to try this:

1. When they say lemons in the recipe they mean things that look like this :-









Which are harder to find in India and you are more likely to come across these:-













They're called "key-limes" and are smaller, seedier, have a thinner rind and are also tangier than lemons... So if the recipe says four lemons and you have key-limes, use only two or three if you like it really tangy... And you might also want to reduce the number of eggs to three... The egg yellow is basically what gives the filling its colour thickens it and the egg white is used for the meringue on top of the pie.
2. For the pie crust; 1/2 cup butter folded into 1 cup flour and then add 1/4 cup cold water till the dough binds worked pretty well, its just a little hard to roll out without breaking, so you could add 1/2 an egg to that for better binding or just carefully roll it out between two sheets of wax paper and then remove the top layer of paper, position in the dish and remove the other layer... also, make a few holes with a fork on the bottom and sides of the shell to prevent it from puffing up during baking... (200 degree celcius, 20 mins)

Happy Baking!

You can find the recipe here.