I made Delia’s delicious Lemon Meringue Pie yesterday. The excess of eggs and lemons after last week’s pancake feast called for swift action. Her recipe online is (linked above) slightly different than in her classic “Delia’s Complete Cookery Course” using 3 eggs between the filling and the meringue topping. I definitely used too much lemon – my filling was actually too lemon-y and definitely too liquid. However it has firmed up a little since then so definitely heed her suggestion to eat warm or cold i.e. not straight from the oven.
I hate making pastry. No actually I don’t mind making pastry – I hate rolling it out. Maybe I’m too much of a perfectionist but I find it falls apart and I know it does not benefit from handling so I get frustrated when it breaks and I have to start again because I worry it’ll lose it’s lightness and become chewy. I think if I made this again I would use Jamie Oliver‘s trick of rolling the pastry into a fat sausage, resting it, and then slicing it thinly, placing the rounds in the pastry tin and then squidging them together to create your case. I have actually done this with both the top and bottom of an apple pie and although it’s not all perfect I like to think it looks rustic. It would be perfect for this recipe as the pastry is only the base. In Delia’s recipe she rabbits on about cutting off a strip of pastry and dampening it. Frankly I couldn’t follow these instructions (not helped by the 4 year old climbing up beside me and insisting on helping while I was trying to stay out of Himself’s way while he was tending the roast) so I skipped them. If anyone can explain the logic please do. How she managed to extract the pie from her pie-dish as in her photograph is beyond me but as you can see from my photograph I used a pretty pie dish to make up. Himself commented that it looked just like the kind of pie that gets slung in slapstick when I took it out of the oven. Not difficult and truly delia-sh.