Mini Lemon Meringue Pies
Really mini. Not 4″ pie pans.
Smaller.
Not cupcake pans.
Smaller.
These were made in mini muffin pans.
These are perfect for a bring-a-salad-or-dessert church gathering. You know, there are 20 desserts to choose from and you have a hard time narrowing it down to 5 and one of the desserts calling to you is pie cut into 8 pieces. A piece of pie is a complete dessert, so there goes the rest of the selections. I decided to try making little individual pies instead of a couple big lemon meringue pies to take to the Fall Praise Social picnic this past Sunday evening. And it worked! With these little things, you can have a taste of lemon meringue pie without passing up the pecan bars, eclair dessert, monster cookies, and fresh peach delight.
Use your regular lemon meringue pie recipe or use my favorite recipe featured here. Roll the crust a bit thinner than usual, then cut out circles. The tube of my Pampered Chef Measure-All Cup was the perfect size for circle-cutting. Then, press them into the mini muffin pan and bake at 375 for about 10 minutes. Make the filling and spoon into crusts. Make the meringue and spoon on top of filling. Bake at 375 for about 10 minutes. Should be easy to remember… everything to bake gets baked at 375 for about 10 minutes. 
Here’s the process in pictures:
They tasted exactly like lemon meringue pie. I guess that would make sense, what with using that recipe and all. They’re long gone, and I just feel like snitching one off the picture and inhaling it in 2 bites.
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In other news, you may want to stay tuned. I think I might blog live this evening for a couple hours. Lexi is planning to make supper. She’s 6. She feels quite capable and wants me to leave her alone in the kitchen with her cookbooks. Tiffany and I are allowed to help her by setting the table and we also may carry things to the table like bbq sauce and salt & pepper. I think she’s in for a bit of surprise and will end up needing more help than she thinks she will. Here is the menu she picked out (going by pictures in cookbooks): Easy Mac n Cheese, Crunchy Chicken Tenders, Trees with Cheese, and Puddin’ Cones. She gets home from school around 4:15. Supper is scheduled for 6:30.
Oh, and did I mention that she doesn’t know the difference between a teaspoon and a Tablespoon?
Fresh Strawberry Pie
I just thought it would be ideal if I’d post this BEFORE the strawberries are completely over! You know, that way you could still try the recipe without having to go to the grocery store and buy some. How many of you have fresh strawberries in little square boxes in your fridge right now? Me! *raises hand*
I made this pie last evening and it lasted only about 24 hours. We have 2 big people and 2 little people here. And we all like strawberry pie! So… I’m gonna make another one this weekend! It is just so refreshing and bursting with juicy-berry flavor and so pretty!
This recipe comes from my mother-in-law. There is something about this strawberry pie that makes it stand head and shoulders above regular fresh strawberry pie. You can’t tell it by looking at it. It’s a hidden feature, until you cut it and serve a piece…
It has a cream cheese layer hidden under those strawberries! Mmmmmmm!
Fresh Strawberry Pie
Crust:
1/4 cup butter
3 Tbsp. boiling water
1 cup Bisquick
Mix and press into a 9″ pie plate. Bake at 375 for 15 minutes.
Cream cheese layer:
1/4 cup powdered sugar
4 oz. cream cheese
3/4 cup Cool Whip
Mix and spread on cooled crust.
Strawberry layer:
1/4 cup instant Clear Jel
3/4 cup sugar
4 cups sliced fresh strawberries
1/2 cup water
Add the water to the strawberries. Mix sugar and Clear Jel together. Sprinkle over the strawberries and mix in.
Pour over cream cheese mixture.
Top with more Cool Whip.
Chill. It sort of sets up right away, but it’s best if it chills for a couple hours.
Important note 
:When peaches are in season, please remember this recipe… it works great to substitute the strawberries for sliced fresh peaches. I wonder if it would work to substitute other fruit too, like blueberries or raspberries.
Lemon Meringue Pie
I’ve been making this pie since before I started this cooking blog. Every time I’d make it, I’d toy with the idea of featuring it. But I never did… here’s why: I don’t have meringue down to a science yet. Sometimes it turns out, sometimes it doesn’t. I was planning to have this detailed ‘How to Make the Perfect Meringue’ tutorial when I feature it. But, instead of waiting until I’m a meringue expert, I decided to feature it now and get tips from you for making the perfect meringue. So, I made this lemon pie this past weekend and the meringue happened to turn out well… which was kinda handy because it’s not as much fun to feature flops!
I think this pie has just the right amount of lemon flavor, just the right amount of yellow color, and just the right amount of meringue. It’s adapted from the A Taste of the Country cookbook. In there, it’s called ‘World’s Best Lemon Pie’. And so far, in my opinion, it’s held true to its name. When I say it’s adapted from there, I mean that I follow the recipe, but made a few little changes:
1. Deleting the 1 tsp. of grated lemon peel
2. Insisting on fresh-squeezed lemon juice as opposed to any lemon juice
3. Adding a 4th egg white to the meringue to make a higher pile of it
4. Adding 1/4 tsp. cream of tartar to the meringue
I’ll post the recipe how I make it…
Lemon Meringue pie
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
3 Tbsp. flour
1/4 tsp. salt
2 cups water
3 egg yolks, beaten
1 Tbsp. butter
1/4 cup fresh-squeezed lemon juice
1 9″ baked pie crust (for a pie crust tutorial, go here)
Meringue:
4 egg whites
1/4 tsp. cream of tartar
1/2 cup sugar
In a saucepan, combine sugar, cornstarch, flour, and salt. Gradually stir in water. Cook and stir over medium heat until thickened and bubbly. Reduce heat; cook and stir 2 minutes more.
Remove from the heat.
Gradually stir 1 cup into egg yolks.
Return all to saucepan.
Bring to a boil. Cook and stir for 2 minutes. Remove from the heat. Stir in the butter and lemon juice.
Beat egg whites and cream of tartar until soft peaks form.
Gradually add sugar and beat until stiffer peaks form and sugar is dissolved (if you rub a bit of meringue between your thumb and finger, it will feel smooth as opposed to gritty).
Pour lemon filling into pie crust
and immediately spread the meringue on, making sure to seal it to the edges of the crust. I start by taking a knife and sealing the edges, then pile and swirl the rest of the the meringue on.
Bake at 375 for about 13 minutes. Cool.
Store in refrigerator.
Tiffany (3) says she LOVES lemon pie… she eats the meringue off, then suddenly she’s ‘full and can’t eat the rest’. Hmmm, never thought meringue would be so filling. I oughta make a meringue only pie for her sometime.
Want a piece?
ShooFly Pie - a Pennsylvania Dutch specialty
Did you ever have it? I’m pretty sure I did before, but I’d never made it. Shannon grew up with it. He mentioned it awhile ago and I couldn’t think what it looked like or tasted like, so I decided to try it. It was good!
About the only thing I’ve ever made with molasses is Gingerbread cookies at Christmastime. If you like molasses, you’ll love this pie.
I got the recipe from my friend Charlene.
Wet Bottom Shoo-Fly pie
Crumbs
1 cup flour
2/3 cup light brown sugar
1 Tbsp. butter
Combine all ingredients and mix until uniform Set aside 1 cup.
Liquid
1 egg beaten
3/4 -1 cup golden molasses ( Charlene said, “I always use 1 cup”, so I did too)
3/4 cup boiling water
1 tsp. baking soda
Stir soda into water. Combine all ingredients and mix thoroughly. Stir in remaining crumbs.
Pour into unbaked pie crust.
Top with 1 cup of crumbs.
Bake at 375 for 10 min and then 350 for 30 min.
Yum! Make one for yourself! This one didn’t last long around here.
How to make a Pie Crust
Ok, I’ll just show you how I do it, but don’t expect alot of tips and all. Who knows, after this post, you might be giving me a lot of tips! That would be great, it would make us all better pie crust makers. And you might laugh at how I do it, for example, I use Saran Wrap in the pie-crust-making process. *Huh?!*
Warning: Eyes may glaze over… there are lots of pictures and it got a little wordy.
First, the recipe. This is the only pie crust recipe I use and I don’t even try others because this one works great and has only 4 ingredients and it gets compliments now and then:
Pie Crust
1 1/3 cups flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup butter-flavored shortening (Does shortening have an ‘e’ in it? I keep adding then erasing it. I should go look on the can.)
3 Tbsp. ice water
I put the flour and salt into a bowl and give it a few stirs w\ the teaspoon that I measured the salt with. Yeah, I about always measure stuff, I’m not one of those ‘just dump it in’ people. Then, I mix the shortening in with a potato masher…
I’ve tried a pastry blender, two knives, a fork, and nothing works quite as good as a potato masher.
When it looks about like this, pour the water in all at once and quickly stir it with a fork. More like pourthewaterinallatonceandquicklystiritwithafork. Not sure why, but I feel some urgency to get it stirred in, maybe because I’m afraid it would soak into the part where it’s pooled, then not get evenly dispersed. Anyway, I think that little tidbit might fall under the category of ‘Weird Quirks’ instead of ‘Pie-Crust-Making Tips’.
When it looks like this,
stop stirring and get a piece of Saran wrap, lay it on the counter, and sprinkle it with flour. Then, with your hands, get all the dough and squeeze it together into a ball, then flatten it a bit and put it on the floured Saran wrap.
Sprinkle flour over the top.
Take the rolling pin and roll it this way,
then that way.
Sprinkle some more flour on because the rolling pin will be starting to stick a little.
Roll it out some more till it’s a couple inches bigger than the pie plate all the way around. Put one hand under the Saran wrap and the other hand on the back of the pie plate, and flip the whole works over.
Peel off the Saran wrap. Now, here’s an actual tip: Instead of just pressing the crust down into the pan, lift it up off the edge and let it line the pan without pushing down on it. Otherwise it will stretch the dough, then it’ll shrink when it bakes. I don’t really know how to explain it, but just DON’T make the dough stretch by pressing it down into where the side and bottom of pan meet.
You can’t really see it, but I’m not just pressing the dough down in with my fingertips… I’m lifting up the edge and putting it down in to line the ‘corner’. Once it’s all in there, press down a little around the top edge, this’ll make it easier to cut the extra dough off. Take a knife and cut it off.
Here’s where my extra dough always goes…
And she’d get my camera and take pictures of her own pie dough creations. Close up pictures. And the camera would focus on stuff behind the subject being photographed…
I usually crimp the edges of the dough between my thumb and finger.
Poke the bottom and side of crust with a fork.
Bake at 375 for 12-15 minutes. And you’ve got a pie crust.
Yeah, it does shrink just a tiny bit, but it’s good enough for me. I’d rather have that than mess with putting beans in it to bake it.
And, last but not least, the famous pie crust question… Is it flaky? I think so…
Now, let’s hear from you… I know alot of you out there make pies. Please give us some more tips!
About Me
Hi! Welcome to my kitchen! My name is Kay. I'm from central Ohio. I love cooking and baking. Especially baking. It's thereapeudic for me. I'm not a professional or gourmet cook by any means. I'm a Christian homemaker who happens to take pictures of some of the food I make. I have 2 little 'helpers'... Lexi (7) and Tiffany (3), who are young cooks in training. I don't do anything on the grill... that's where my husband Shannon comes in! He grills quite a bit, especially in the summer. So, sit back and enjoy browsing thro' the recipes. If you try some of them, I'd love to hear feedback on how you liked them! If you want to contact me, my email address is kaylouann@gmail.com
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