Lemon Meringue Pie - Great British Book of Baking

It had been ages since I made a lemon meringue pie.  I love the fluffy meringue top and tart, toothsome filling, but with so many other things to make, I had overlooked this old-fashioned favourite for a while.

When my colleague, Collette, asked me did I make lemon meringue pie, I decided to prove that I do by making one.

I ended up using Dorie Greenspan's Good for Almost Everything Pie Dough for the base, and for the filling, I used the recipe from p168 of The Great British Book of Baking by Linda Collister:

You need to blind bake your pastry shell in a 9" tart pan, and let it cool.  Then you make the filling, as follows:

Lemon Filling

3 medium lemons
40g cornflour
300ml boiling water
3 egg yolks
85g sugar
50g butter

Meringue topping

4 egg whites (I used just 3)
200g sugar

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Grate the zest from the lemons into a heatproof bowl, then add the juice and cornflour and stir to make a smooth paste. Add the boiling water and mix to combine, then empty into a saucepan and cook, stirring constantly until it boils and thickens, then reduce the heat and simmer for a minute.

Remove the pan from the heat and add the yolks, then mix in the butter and sugar.  (I then put the mixture in the pan back on the stove and heated it until it thickened a little more because it seemed quite runny and I was worried it wouldn't set.)   Pour the lemon filling into the baked pastry shell. 

Whisk the egg whites until soft peaks form, then add the sugar and whisk until it forms a glossy smooth meringue. Spoon the meringue on top of the filling, spreading it right to the edges and completely covering the filling.

Bake the pie in the oven for 20 minutes until the meringue is golden brown.  Allow the pie to cool before serving.  While the recipe says to serve the pie at room temperature, I liked it best chilled.