Hi Hi Lemon Meringue Pie (Pie Crust)

My mom recently heard that lemons can prevent fatty liver if you drink juice of 1 lemon everyday for 10 days.  So she bought lemons and left it in the fridge. haha

If life hands you lemons (in my case, if your mom hands you lemons), make lemon pie!  Lemon Pie isn't really something I crave for like the way I would, with say, chocolate cake.  Lemon pie is nice once in a while, when you've eaten too much flavorful food and would like to clean your palette.

I got this recipe from YouTube, as usual.  I've seen a few different videos but I liked Betty's recipe the most.  Her pie looked delicious and easy to make. Not only did she describe her lemon pie to be "to-die-for" but she also pronounces the word "pie" in a soft American Southern accent: pha. haha.

There are 3 components to this, the LEMON filling, the MERINGUE top, and the PIE crust.

We should start off from the base, which is Betty's Press-in Pie Crust.  You can watch her video here.  This is pretty much the same as the Short Crust Pastry I made, the difference is that you don't need to refrigerate it, you just press it on the pie plate.

Ingredients:

1 cup All purpose flour
1 tbsp Confectioner's Sugar
1/2 tsp salt
6 tbsp COLD butter, diced
1-2 tbsp ICE COLD water

This recipe is a little bit different from my shortcrust pastry because it has sugar in it, Betty said that it's nice to put a bit of unexpected sweetness in it, because it's just usually salty.

If you have a food processor, which I FINALLY OWN!!! I recently bought Philips 700w Hand Blender, wait for my review on it, you can just throw the flour, sugar, salt into it then pulse it a few times just to mix, then throw in your 6 tbsp diced butter then pulse.  You'll know you're done if the flour-butter mixture is now yellowish and looks like breadcrumbs.

If you do not have a food processor, worry not, you can do it the way I did my shortcrust pastry, by hand!  All you need to do is press the butter into the flour.  Make sure to coat the butter with flour first so it won't stick onto your fingers, just keep doing it and you'll see it's going to come together at the end.  Warning, your thumbs are going to be really sore after this. haha   You can now drizzle a tablespoon of ICE COLD water and start mixing it with your hands until all the crumbs come into a ball which will become your dough.  Start pressing the dough using your fingers and palm onto the pie plate.  Then form the fluted edge, but you can also use a fork and press the edges down.  At this point, you have to REMEMBER (because I forgot, I only remembered when I was peering into the oven and my pie crust was breathing!), to puncture several holes on the pie crust with a fork, because when you bake the crust, it will need air pockets to release the steam, and if you didn't do that, then it's going to form a big bubble and stay that way instead of just flat.

Then bake the crust for about 10 minutes @ 425F, but I suggest you watch it and check on it every 2 minutes just to make sure, that's how i found out that I forgot to puncture holes on the crust.  Also take note of the fluted edge, because the higher the peaks, the easier it burns.  See my not so pretty pie crust. haha  I didn't do a good job flattening the dough evenly and so the middle was too thin and burnt quickly.

Have fun and watch out for my meringue and lemon filling entry!