Mini Lemon Pie

Difficulty 1/5

This is a cute way to serve lemon pie, and also an excellent way to cook dessert for few people without leaving half the mould for you to finish later! Because you know you would! I was actually craving something sweet but because my boyfriend is in London and I’m in Santiago right now I knew a whole mould would be waaaay too much. It is an extremely easy dessert to make and nice to taste too as it has 3 distinctly different textures. Hope you enjoy it!

Portions: 3 moulds of 5cm of diameter. If you want to make a full 20cm mould, multiply by 2.5.

Ingredients:

– 1 cup condensed milk
– 4 eggs
– 3 lemons
– 1/2 tsp vainilla essence
– 80gr crushed vainilla or graham crackers (put them in a food processor or you can even crush them inside the package by hitting it, works for stress too! haha)
–  60gr melted salted butter
– 1/2 cup of sugar

Preparation

1. Preheat your oven to 710F / 380C
2. Mix your crushed crackers with the melted butter. You’ll feel tempted to try it… give into it! This is already very good.
3. Divide this mix into three and push onto the bottom and borders of your moulds to make your crust. Put this into the oven for 10min.
4. While that’s in the oven, we do the filling. Mix the condensed milk with the juice of the three lemons. TIP! Here make sure that when you squeeze them you only do as long as it’s easy to extract it. If you go to far with the squeeze you’ll be taking the juice from the skin which is quite bitter. To get the most juice out of your lemon, roll it on the counter applying a bit of pressure before cutting them open to release the juice inside. Now add the vainilla essence and 1 egg yolk and mix it all together. Once you take the moulds with the crust from the oven, pour this mix onto it and take again to the oven. This time I put the heat only at the bottom so it didn’t get hard on the top, and in they went for 15min.

5. Now the meringue! Take the egg whites from the eggs and beat until it stands in peaks.

6. Put the sugar in a small pot and put in barely enough water to cover it. It should look like this:

Put it in medium heat and wait for it to become transparent. DO NOT use any utensil to stir it, if you need to do this because it’s melting unevenly, just twirl around the pot. Do not let it become caramel (golden colour).
7. Add this to the egg yolks in a fine flow while beating so they cook with its heat. In the end they will look like this (look at those cute peaks!):

8. Once you take out your moulds, put the egg yolks in a pastry bag and decorate them. Afterwards, put back in the oven, this time top and bottom heat until the yolks are golden.

9. Let cool before you serve, it’s even better if it can be cooled in the fridge, it becomes so much yummier! Now serve pretty and enjoy 🙂