Old Fashioned Lemon Pie

Are you a cake loving nerd? Then you’ve come to the right place! This is the merger of Math, Physics
and Cake – The core of every engineer - and what’s not to like?

I’m crazy about lemon, and would usually use this for dinner guests or birthday parties.
This pie has a perfect balance of crumbly crust, lemon filling and a sweet and soft layer of meringue. It’s my favorite, so I hope you’ll try it. Anyway – let’s get started!

The pie consists of three parts, and each contains some different ingredients:

Shortcrust pastry:

- 300 g of flour

- 200 g of butter

- 100 g of sugar

Lemon filling:

- Lemon juice from 2 lemons (Preferably organic, then you can use it for the next ingredient too)

- Grated lemon peel from 1 organic lemon

- 100 g of sugar

- 2 eggs

- 4 egg yolks

- 2 dl of cream

Meringue:

- 3 egg whites

- 100 g of sugar

The shortcrust pastry is my favorite dough recipe. It’s super simple: Mix the flour and sugar, then use your hands
to mix the butter into the dough. The butter can come straight of the refrigerator: Your hands will quickly heat it and make it easy to work with. When The butter, flour and sugar are combined into a nice and smooth dough, put it in the refrigerator to cool off a bit. In the mean time you can get started with the lemon filling!

The lemon filling needs lemons, so start out by grating the peel of 1 organic lemon. (It is easier to do this before you cut the lemon, so start out with this.) After you’re done grating, cut the 2 lemons in half and squeeze out the juice.

Mix the peel and juice in a bowl, then add the other ingredients and mix. Keep mixing until there’s a bit of foam on the surface.

It’s time to bake the cake. Find a nice pie dish and cover the inside in butter. Then spread the dough on the inside of the dish. You can use time rolling it out and shaping it on a kitchen table before putting it on the dish, but in my
experience it works just as well to spread it directly into the dish.

The dough should pre-bake without filling in for 12 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius. After the prebaking the dough should have a light golden-brown colour.

Add the lemon filling into the dish, and bake the pie for 25 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius.

When the pie has been baked it should look golden-brown. The filling will still be very soft inside the cake, but the top should be somewhat firm.

Start making the meringue, when the pie is in the oven.

The meringue is very simple, but it takes time to mix it enough so be patient (and use an electric mixer or your arms might just fall of ;-) )

Mix egg Whites and sugar until stiff. If you can turn the bowl with the mixture upside down - without it falling out, then it’s ready.

Then you can decorate your pie. I started out by spreading an even layer of meringue on the pie, and then I made my decoration on top of that. I decided to make a STM related design – making my father really happy. At first there was a bit of discussion whether it was a STM or an AFM cake, but we decided on STM. (Yes - atom
physics makes my dad happy.)

After decorating the pie with meringue, put it back in the oven for a few minutes. The meringue will turn golden and it will give a tiny bit of crust to the top of the cake. Be very careful not to burn the meringue – the sugar will keep burning after you’ve taken it out of the oven.

Let the pie cool down before eating it. I served it for my family with tea, and it was quite cozy.

That was all for my pie: I hope you will find inspiration in this recipe – stay creative and bon appetite!