Blog Party #24 Lemon meringue pies and rose spritzer

Blog Party hosted by Stephanie at Dispensing Happiness is turning two this month, and to celebrate, the theme of this month's Blog Party is Blogger's Choice. Brilliant! I had already decided to make baby lemon meringue pies for work this week, so nominating them as the appetizer for my entry for Blog Party was a no brainer.

The recipe that I used for my lemon meringue pies is this one, found on Exclusively Food. In my madness, I started making the pies at 8pm on Sunday night to take to work on Monday morning. Accordingly, this recipe was especially attractive because the pastry is made in the food processor rather than having to laboriously rub the butter into the flour. Making the pastry was a breeze, and took no more than 5 minutes (which was a blessing at that time of night, given that the pastry has to chill for an hour before you can use it). Anyone can make this pastry if they have a food processor, I promise - it is so easy.

Instead of rolling out the pastry to line a pie plate and blind baking it, as you would for a full sized pie, I cut out circles from the rolled pastry and placed them in patty tins to form baby tart shells. Before baking, I pricked the bottom of each tart shell a couple of times with a fork, and baked the tart shells for around 20 minutes (yep, the same time as recommended for the full sized tart shell!).

The lemon curdy filling was also really simple to make - I ended up with a thick, sharp yet sweet, smooth curd, and did not have to sieve out any lumps. The sharpish lemon with the lovely fluffy sweet meringue top is a killer combination. The only part that was even remotely difficult about making these pies was trying to spread a meringue top over each tiny tart to seal it without mixing it into the lemon curd. (I have to confess that around 11pm at night while I was doing this, I was asking myself why!!)

There was plenty of lemon curd filling left over (having made tiny tarts instead of a full sized one), which will go perfectly on crumpets for breakfast on chilly Melbourne mornings.

I managed to make 24 perfect (ah, well, I thought so! As you can see, I ate one!) baby lemon meringue pies, and one bite assuaged my fears that the pastry would be tastless and inedible - it was crisp and melt in your mouth. (I have a mild phobia about making pastry, even though I have in recent years been able to make it successfully - that fear of failure never leaves you!)

For an accompanying cocktail, I looked no further than the wonderful wild hibiscus flowers that I purchased for Wild Weeds, and made a rose spritzer. I placed a hibiscus flower plus a little syrup in which they are stored in the bottom of a champagne flute, and filled the flute half and half with rose wine and sparkling mineral water. Yum!

Happy second birthday to Stephanie's Blog Party!

This post is dedicated to Tim, who likes lemon meringue pie and who inspired this choice.