You know when you see chefs on the television and they have all their ingredients ready in little bowls? Well this is one of those recipes where you would benefit from doing that. There is so much to do, and you certainly don’t want to start breaking eggs and weighing sugar when you are in the middle of stirring your lemon filling. So follow these step by step instructions and it should work like clockwork.
Ingredients
Pastry:
175g plain flour
100g butter (room temperature)
10g icing sugar
1 egg yolk
1 tablespoon water
Lemon Filling:
Grated zest of 2 lemons
Lemon juice and water to 300ml
100g white sugar
20g cornflour
80g butter
3 egg yolks
1 large egg
Meringue:
4 egg whites
200g white sugar
2 teaspoon cornflour
Crack an egg and put the yolk into one cup and the white into another cup.
Grease a baking tray 20cm x 25cm with some butter. Cut a piece of baking paper the same size as the baking tray. Put to one side for now.
To make the pastry, measure the flour, butter and icing sugar in your mixing bowl and mix together, either using your fingers or the whisk attachment, until you get fine crumbs. Then add the egg yolk and a tablespoon of water and bring it together with your hands into a ball.
Put the pastry onto your worktop which has been sprinkled with flour and roll it out carefully so that it will fit into your baking tray. This pastry is very rich and consequently very crumbly, so it isn’t easy to work with and you will find that it cracks. But don’t worry, you can patch it up and it will be covered, so nobody will see it. It is all about the taste.
When you have rolled the pastry, carefully place it in the baking tin. It should be big enough to cover the bottom of the tin. If some of it goes up the side, that’s fine, you can trim it later.
Put the pastry in the fridge for around an hour. Because the pastry is so delicate, it is easier to roll it and put it in the tin before you chill it. If you try to roll it when it is cold, it will just break up.
After an hour, cover the pastry with the baking paper and then some baking beans (dried peas or rice will do if you don’t have any proper baking beans) to hold it down and bake in the oven for 10 minutes at 180 degrees. After 10 minutes, take off the beans and the baking paper and let the pastry cook for another 5 minutes.
This will be enough time to make the lemon filling and the meringue.
Start with the lemon filling. Separate another 3 eggs. Put the yolks into one cup and add the 3 egg whites to the cup that already has one egg white in it – so you now have 4 egg whites together.
Add 1 full egg to the egg yolks and beat them together.
Weigh 80g of butter.
Grate the zest off the lemons. Put the zest in a small pan and squeeze the juice from both lemons into a measuring jug. Put the kettle on to boil.
Weigh 200g of sugar and 20g of cornflour and add to the small pan with the lemon zest. When the kettle has boiled, pour boiling water over the lemon juice, so that it measures 300ml. Then add this lemon water to the pan, put on a medium heat and stir for a few minutes, until it begins to thicken. Then take the pan off the heat and add the butter, continuing to stir until it has melted.
Add the beaten egg yolks and egg and stir it quickly. Put the pan back on a low heat and let it simmer for around 3 minutes , until the mixture thickens some more. You want it to get to the stage where it falls off the spoon really slowly. When that happens, take it off the heat and leave it on one side while you make the meringue.
Measure 200g of sugar and 2 teaspoons of cornflour into a small bowl.
Put the 4 egg whites into your mixing bowl and whisk until the eggs have doubled in size and form stiff peaks. At this stage, slow down the speed of the mixer and spoon in the sugar and cornflour bit by bit, while still whisking.
By this time, the pastry is probably ready and you can trim the edges of the pastry with a sharp knife, so that it covers the bottom of the baking tray, but not the sides.
Carefully spoon the lemon mixture over the pastry, making sure that it reaches the edges. Then spoon the meringue over the lemon mixture, starting at the edges and working your way into the middle. When you have done that, you can use the back of a fork to make little peaks in the meringue.
Bake in the oven for 45 minutes at 180 degrees. The meringue will be brown on top but still white and squidgy underneath. Leave it for around half an hour to set, before you eat it.
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