Lemon Meringue...

Since our stuff finally arrived this week I now have some stuff to enable me to make use of our oven. As we had friends coming round for dinner, it seemed like the perfect excuse to make something and I decided to try and make a lemon meringue. This was to be my first time making it completely from scratch as in the UK I would normally buy a packet sauce for the lemon filling.

Things to note:
1. I got a recipe off the internet as my recipe book has been misplaced by the mother-in-law (along with my sandwich toaster)

2. This is my first time using our new oven so I'm not sure how I'll need to compensate on temperature to calibrate to recipe temperatures.

3. It doesn't appear to be fan assisted so I don't know how even things will cook.

4. The recipe calls for the juice of two lemons. On the squeezy lemon juice thing I got in Korea, it doesn't give any indication of the strength/or how many lemons there are in it.

Basically this is Lemon Meringue 1.0.

Pastry:
With the weather as it is at the moment when it comes to making the pastry, there is a window of about 10 seconds between the butter being too hard to mix with flower and melting completely and being useless for pastry. Nevertheless a dough was formed, rolled out and put in a pie case. I didn't have anything to weight it down with (my mum has this jar of lentils that are 30 years old and used to weigh down pastry and rpevent it from rising) but then the recipe didn't call for it. 20 minutes in the oven and it looked like this:
While the pastry was cooking I was working on the lemon filling. I almost burnt it while I was over at the computer checking on the recipe but it was ok. It's basically water, lemon juice, cornflour, egg yolks and butter. Visually it wasn't quite what I'm used to, but it tasted ok. I do need to work on figuring out the correct amount of lemon to put in...let me know if you want to volunteer as a taste-tester. A quick whisk of some egg whites and sugar and the meringue was ready to go on top.
45 minutes in the oven on a low heat and you have a pie that is ready to eat. Actually I think the low heat was too low cos the meringue was a bit soft...but there you go, I'll know for next time.
Now for the most important part, the taste. As an experienced eater of lemon meringues I could find plenty of things that were slightly off but it seemed to go down well with the others.