Lemon Meringue Pie

This is officially my second endeavor in the JOWT Challenge (Jim's Obscure World Tour), and it was markedly harder to make than the first food challenge, pierogi.  It turns out, lemon meringue pies are really difficult to get just right.

I wasn't going to mention it, but this was the only nice looking slice of pie that came out of the whole thing.  I didn't have to tell you that, but in the interest of full disclosure, and just so you don't think that this is easy...there you have it.

I'm not putting this sucker on the recipe page, as I didn't change anything and I wasn't super impressed with my results.  Granted, I take full responsibility, but I'll have to tinker with the recipe for a bit before it goes up there.  Anyway, here's the recipe I used.

First, I baked the pie crust...I just halved the recipe for crust that I used for the Jayhawk Pie last time.  That part came out great, but you do have to bake the shell for the first 15 minutes with pie weights (yeah, apparently that's a thing), or you can go the ghetto route like I did and put some foil in there and fill it up with coins.  You have to do that so that the crust doesn't rise.  Then you remove the foil and coins, prick it with a fork, and bake it another ten minutes.

Oh man, it looks delicious in this one, huh?  That lemon stuff is actually called "curd", I didn't know that.  And it is great.  I should have let it thicken up more, though.

The meringue...the show-stealer.  I should have had about twice as much.  In fact, I probably should have had like twice as much lemon curd too.  Oh well.  Lessons learned.

Supposedly it's really important that the filling be "piping hot" when you put it in the shell and top it with meringue, that way the meringue cooks a little bit on contact and doesn't just slide off the pie.  This was mine like... 15 minutes out of the fridge.

Why don't I sound more excited?  It looks great!  I mean, besides having less than tons of meringue/filling...and besides what I said (truthfully) about there only being one photogenic slice in there...I'll just show you.

I popped it in the fridge to cool overnight and boom.  I woke up to this!

Excuse me, does that pie have a receding hairline?  What in the world?  Yeah.  I was really sad.  I may or may not have turned on Jim, demanding why he had "set me up for failure."  It's called hubris, kids.  Overconfidence.  I was drunk with power after making my first ever successful pie crust from scratch, and thought I could reproduce the results on this little baby.

Oh well.  In the world of food blogging, all that really matters is that one nice looking slice up top, right?  Oh yeah and it still tasted pretty good too.  ;)