After watching a cookery programme recently featuring terrified contestants running around in a tent trying not to let their lemon meringues leak onto the floor, it set me to thinking about the last time I made a lemon meringue pie.  And it was quite some time ago, a good couple of years. 

I studied Home Economics for ‘O’ level, two years of cooking and theory, which was fun, apart from the boring theory, there is only so much a girl can learn about the different ways of treating milk to make – insert product off your choice.  But the cooking was great, and what happens is you have all these different ways of doing things at your finger tips.  We also had a teacher that wasn’t afraid of teaching us things, we learnt all manner of french techniques, roux, choux, puff pastry, rough puff pastry, flakey pastry and short crust pastry.  We made eccles cakes and Christmas puddings, lemon curd, jam, stews and casseroles, pizza’s, bread, egg dishes, Victoria sponges, Swiss roles, biscuits,   creme caramels, fantastic sweet flans of epic proportions, Easter bonnet hat cakes, yule logs, Christmas cakes, you name it we made it. 

Generally we were quite successful as well, apart from when I was making biscuits, because I would toddle off with my washing up to the sink around the corner, get carried away with the banter until someone came running up to me, tea towel flapping in the wind, telling me there was smoke pouring out of my oven.  Eventually I learnt to stay near my oven when cooking biscuits, I now use a timer.

Today I decided to reward hubby with a lemon meringue pie, well really it was an excuse to play with my Kenwood, but you knew that didn’t you. 

The Kenwood made the pastry with the K beater, that was fun, I didn’t even have to get my hands dirty. It worked quite well as well. 

I think I made the lemon curd a bit thick, and I didn’t cook the pastry for long enough after the blind bake section. 

The Kenwood worked magnificently on the whites of the eggs and soon we had